"While not widely known, this work
has greatly influenced a number of Marxian theorists concerned with the
methodological framework of Marx's theory and his relationship to Hegelian
dialectics. In contrast to the traditional reading [...], Eldred and his co-authors
insisted on a systematic reading in which capitalism is the object of investigation
from the beginning, with transitions from one level of theoretical
abstraction to another justified logically by the immanent contradictions
arising in the former." Tony Smith in Science & Society ISSN 0036-8237 Vol. 74 No. 4 2010 p. 565, available at www.arte-fact.org.

"The
recognition that what exists of Marx's project is only a fragment was of
tremendous importance, as this implied seeing Marxian theory as a radically
open project, and developing areas of enquiry which were barely touched
upon by Marx himself. [...] [T]he Anglophone few who followed the Germans
in wishing to reconstruct Capital — the Konstanz-Sydney school,
identified as a 'value-form school' — were seen by most other participants
[in the value-form debate] as overly extreme.
It is a feature of systematic dialectic as it has emerged recently that
such suggestions of a need for a more radical reconstruction are now at
the core of the discussion."
'Communisation
and Value-Form Theory' in Endnotes
ISSN 1943-8281 No. 2 London, April 2010.

2010 Preface

It would
be easy to point to weaknesses in this work by the young Eldred, and detractors
will enjoy doing that, but there are the strengths too (attributable also
to my co-authors of the Appendix), which justify making the 1984 edition
available in an emended, digitized version to comprehensively reassert
in 2010 the insights of value-form analysis. No one will want to accuse
this
work of being infected by the tweedy complacency of academia. Nor does
it cater to the needs of politically-ideologically motivated readers who
tend to want 'applicable' results(P1)
without bothering about the issues for thinking. The year 1984 was the
tail-end of a period of intense interest in Marx on the part of youth in
Australia and West Germany. In Australia this interest took the form of
a reception of structural Althusserian Marxism, whereas in West Germany
it manifested itself especially in reading and research groups around Marx's
critique of political economy. As a young Australian research student in
philosophy, and well-tolerated by my Ph.D. supervisor György Markus,
I joined these West German discussions in 1976, being initiated into all
things Capital by Mike Roth.

Only
in 1984, after completing work on my dissertation, did I come across Heidegger,
who persuaded me that I had to learn ancient Greek to get to the deepest
philosophical questions. Heidegger's phenomenological readings of Aristotle
and Plato opened my eyes for ontology explicitly, beyond the implicit understanding
I had gleaned from reading the dialectical thinkers, Hegel and Marx. It
gradually became apparent that form-analysis was another name for ontology
and that Marx's value-form analysis was nothing other than the key to a
social ontology of capitalist society. Heidegger and Marx can be made to
communicate via the detour of a phenomenological and ontological reading
of the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics on which Heidegger offers
no commentary, but to which Marx refers crucially in the first chapter
of Das Kapital when dealing with the value-form. Thus can cross-fertilization
happen. The exchange and distribution of goods is the core theme of the
fifth Nicomachean book, and those goods comprise not only useful
material things, but the immaterial good of esteem. Hence a connection
between the constitution of commodity-value in exchange and the mutual
estimation of human beings becomes visible, especially through the interchange
of human abilities. The phenomenological interpretation of this connection
culminated in my Social Ontology, published in 2008.(P2)
To unfold a phenomenology of the power play of mutual estimation amounts
to a socio-ontology of whoness.(P3)
But back to my 1984 book.

The
value-form is already ontological, as signalled by the term 'form'. In
the realm of social ontology, the value-form is perhaps the ontological
concept par excellence because it conceptualizes a fundamental form
of sociation (Vergesellschaftung) which is at the same time an elementary
form of social power play with its own ontological structure that
differs in essence from the ontological structure of productive power focused
on by Heidegger. The late Marx can therefore be read as the thinker who
worked out and presented in fine detail the complex ontological structure
of capitalist economy. At the heart of this structure is value as a power
play. The Sydney-Konstanz Project's endeavour to reconstruct Capital
systematically and venture beyond it to the realms of the state and the
private sphere, under the guidance of a critical reading of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie,
therefore amounts to an explicit, detailed presentation of that total historical
socio-ontological constellation called capitalist society.

Writing
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I imbibed the Zeitgeist of those
New Left times in which the issue of overcoming capitalism in favour of
a non-Stalinist, democratic, even libertarian socialism was on the agenda.
Today I do not advocate any kind of socialism, and that not because I have
become older, wiser, mellower, conservative and resigned, but for philosophical
reasons. The sundering of universality from particularity in the value-forms
is the Leitmotiv pervading my attempt at a social ontology of capitalist
society, and the historical possibility of its practical overcoming forms
the backdrop that envisages a conscious sociation replacing non-conscious,
reified sociation. Socialist humanity is to become the ultimate underlying
subject of society and the movements of social life. Human being is thus
thought as subjectivity within a metaphysics (or ontology) of subjectivity.
People, in the plurality of some kind of politically instituted 'we' —
whether it be in a more or less centralized state with democratic institutions,
a structure of workers' councils or whatever — are to become, as "freely
associated producers", the subjects of social life. The dominant medium
of sociation is thus to become consciously political, democratic in the
stead of reified, competitive, gain-seeking sociation via the various value-forms.
The proper name for human beings in such a competition, as I now see in
retrospect, is not subjects of competition, but rather players in the
gainful game.(P4) These players
are free individuals exercising their various powers and abilities in an
interplay with one another.

With
an overcoming in socialism of reified sociation (Überwindung verdinglichter
Vergesellschaftung), people themselves purportedly are to become 'truly'
free on a higher plane of sociation than that enabled by bourgeois private
property. The dream of a democratic socialism, however, is driven by a
totalizing way of thinking that is out to collectively set up and
control
social
living as a whole and is therefore a precipitate, in the socio-political
realm, of what Heidegger calls the set-up (Ge-Stell). Since people
are a plurality, the political, democratic sociation of living-together
can only come about as ongoing political power struggle. Instead
of mutually beneficial, agreed exchanges on the many different competitive
markets (an economic power struggle), socialistic living must consist of
endless, all-engulfing political power struggles on all levels. This amounts
to the end of the individual as such, who is socio-ontologically
possible only in conjunction with the state-protected, reified forms of
sociation emanating from money (which translates as private property).
Today I therefore affirm rather than question that "individual freedom
without private property is impossible". (§76Ab) The value-form of
money and the other value-forms derived from money have historically enabled
the individual and individual freedom in the West. That is, the free individual
is a definite historical form of sociation, and not some kind of imagined
individual living in a pre-social 'state of nature'.

With
the striving for a democratic socialism (or for social-democracy), the
free individual has to be overcome and subjugated to a politically constituted,
social 'we'. It is to lose its garden of privacy for, the reified social
power afforded by the value-forms is to be overridden by the political,
democratically organized, conflictual will. Politics becomes hegemonic,
primary, all-pervasive. With the overcoming of free human individuality,
however, freedom per se is socially eradicated. Anything resembling 'libertarian
socialism' is a contradictio in adjecto. The free human individual
can flourish only where it can be also private, i.e. where it is guaranteed
protection from the incursions of a political plurality, a democratic 'we'
institutionalized in the legitimated power structures of some kind of state.

The
criticisms of individualistic egoism and individualistic consumerism from
the left point indeed to deficiencies in desiring human being itself, which
is ever seeking its individual advantage, but sociation via incessant political
power struggle in any kind of democratic socialism by no means remedies
these deficiencies. Self-seeking is merely displaced from the striving
to gain income (reified social power) to the striving for influence within
the political institutions of powers that be, including democratic economic
and workers' management councils. The private, free, bourgeois individual
metamorphoses into a self-seeking element, whose privacy is no longer protected,
enmeshed and struggling in a web of overarching, more or less democratic,
political structures.

A social
ontology of capitalist-democratic society therefore aims 'modestly' at
bringing to light the structure of the world as it is. There are
certain things which not even the best art, but only philosophical thinking,
can show, and there's no foreknowing what will come historically with such
deeper insight. The figure of Überwindung (overcoming, getting-rid-of)
is displaced by that of Verwindung (getting-over, twisting-free-of).
Instead of striving to overcome reified, value-form sociation practically-politically,
philosophical insight into reified sociation and its necessary adjunct
in the bourgeois-democratic institutions enables a distancing in
the way of thinking (Denkart) from the gainful game of striving
for income, from the endless political power struggles within the democratic
institutions and also from the unreflected striving for social status as
somewho, but not in favour of entering another way of thinking that is
out to politically-collectively set up and govern social living. Such distancing
is a getting-over that, even whilst daily living continues to require engagement
in power struggles, preserves those precious private interstices and niches
in which individual freedom, both shared and solitary, can thrive in spite
of all.

ME
Cologne, February 2010

1984 Synopsis of the Entire Dissertation

This work
grew out of a research project on the reconstruction of the various drafts
to Marx's Critique of Political Economy. Four of us (Roth/Kleiber/Hanlon/Eldred)
have arrived at a form-analytic reconstruction of Marx's Capital
reproduced here in the Appendix, which forms the indispensable conceptual
basis for the present work.

Part
1 summarises PROVISIONALLY some of the principal categories of the capital-analysis
(it cannot replace the development provided in the Appendix) by way of
providing a transition to an analysis of the "surface of capitalist economy"
(Parts II & III). The principal form-analytic categories of the
competition-analysis are those of PROPERTY, PERSON and SUBJECT OF COMPETITION.
These are developed through a consideration of the subjective activity
of individuals in relation to the pre-given (value-)form-determinate capitalist
economic objectivity. The subject of competition is the bearer of
COMPETITIVE FREEDOM, the overarching concept of the competition-analysis,
whose contradictoriness is to be laid bare.

Part
IV investigates the universal social subject which necessarily complements
the competitive economy. The state too is conceptualised in relation
to the form-determinate contradictory freedom of the bourgeois epoch, as
REALISATION of freedom.

The
principal figure of the total analysis, from the beginning of the capital-analysis,
is a DIALECTICAL one: the DIREMPTION of the (ABSTRACT) UNIVERSAL from the
PARTICULAR. This diremption is first constituted in the double-character
of bourgeois labour, conceptualised in the value-form analysis. The
figure recurs again and again as the INNER BAND which, IN REALITY and FOR
THINKING CONSCIOUSNESS, connects the bourgeois form of society into a contradictory
TOTALITY. The claim of the present work, that our present form of
society constitutes a totality, can only be validated by thinking in a
SYSTEM. On the various levels of the analysis, right up to its crescendo
in the investigation of DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS, the contents of EVERYDAY
CONSCIOUSNESS are taken into account in order to demonstrate to it that
the various aspects of contemporary life are only lived out as modes of
expression of the underlying essential contradiction.

0. Preface: Preliminaries

Why Marx? Why philosophy at all? The same ground which has
prevented philosophy from withering away has also kept the first scientific
socialist alive. Philosophy lives on, decrepit, in the learned institutions.
It occupies itself with the past and with epistemology, in which contents
come forward, mishandled, as case studies. Here and there it is able
to maintain a flicker of vitality in those questions which gave it birth:
"teachings about correct living" (Adorno 1951 p.7). For those who have
not swum with the tide of the dissolution of philosophy in the empirical
social sciences, philosophy has maintained a fascination, even in connection
with the attempt to come to grips with our contemporary life (and not as
mere escape from life).

Marx has a reputation as a philosopher, and is read by some of those
interested in philosophy. His status as 'scientific socialist' is
a drawcard in the political arena rather than for students of philosophy.
The latter are often attracted to philosophy because philosophy is precisely
NOT
science, at least not in the sense of the natural sciences. Marx
lets himself be misused by those with an allergy against any form of science,
who want to find philosophical inspiration in a free and easy manner, without
the irksome constriction of rigorous thought-fetters. Their conception
of philosophy borders on what everyday understanding often means by philosophy:
wild, fanciful, subjective ideas without practical application.

Marx has suffered his ups and downs in his career as the originator
of marxism. At present, his popularity is at a fairly low ebb.
For over a decade, some marxists have spoken of a 'crisis of marxism'(1).
In popular understanding, and in some more serious interpretations of Marx,
he is represented as the thinker who made various prophecies, including
that of the 'Inevitability of socialism'. The agent of this 'historical
mission' was to have been the proletariat. One can doubtless find
evidence for this interpretation of Marx in his writings. Elements
of the Hegelian Philosophy of History found their way, with a radical turn
to the /ii) left, into Marx's thinking. The comparison of these optimistic
elements of a philosophy of history with the course of history in the 20th
Century has provided a childishly simple way of settling accounts with
this revolutionary. A scientist whose predictions turn out to be
wrong is obviously a quack, a mere idealistic soothsayer. With this
judgment, many have saved themselves the trouble of gaining a closer acquaintance
with Marx; others have read some Marx with this idee fixe in mind,
which has prevented them coming to any fruitful understanding of the left-Hegelian.

Enlightened consciousness today - in contrast to the hopeful thinking
of socialists, especially in Germany, up until the thirties - knows that
history does not stand on our side, that it was a bad joke to talk of an
'objective necessity' of the proletariat reaching revolutionary consciousness.
This enlightened consciousness is also cynical: it sees that, since the
proletariat has failed to fulfil its prescribed historical mission, that
we must make the best of things and set aims more modest than that of a
socialist revolution. That is indeed one way out of a dilemma.
The knowledge that we cannot rely on the current of history to move us
forward is given a twist towards the affirmative: If history will not move
us forward, then we should let ourselves be swirled along in its eddies.
The graffito 'Only dead fish swim with the stream' makes a poignant point
against this kind of resignative thinking. In the reified society,
it is all too easy to allow things to have their way; this is one aspect
of fetishised thinking. Everyday life is profuse with the compulsion
of things, of the necessity of bowing to externally given circumstances.
Marx's theory can be interpreted as a conceptualisation of these externally
given circumstances', of the 'compulsion of things' apparently independent
of human will. This conceptualisation should be able to point the
way forward by showing the fulcrum where collective subjectivity could
overcome reified relations and become subject of its own history.

A century of marxism has left a sorry record behind. The world
has not become socialist. Real existing socialism has been dubbed
by the Free West a 'totalitarian' system, and that not entirely without
justification (although with this designation, /iii) the West follows its
own insidious tendentious aims). Critical theories which have abandoned
any association with the aim of a socialist revolution have been born and
have gained a following. From the fact that socialism has not been
realised, these theories propose that one had better give up the idea altogether.
In doing so, they take leave of the problematic circumscribed by Hegel
and Marx, which is directed at a dialectical theory of the totality in
its contradictoriness. The totality is pronounced to be ineluctable,
or even evolutionarily advantageous for humankind. The category of
contradiction is relegated the status of an Hegelian residue in Marx, smacking
of idealism, whose retention can only hinder the development of critical
thinking.

The critics of dialectical theory are right in one point: the dialectical
aspects of Marx's theory have to date not become a political force.
The party in which Marx and Engels had the greatest direct influence -
German Social Democracy - never at any time embodied the radical politics
implied by the dialectical aspects of Marx's theory(2).
Instead, it was the evolutionist aspects in Marx and Engels which caught
the imagination of Social Democracy and allowed it a comfortable path.
The evolutionist Marx is also the exoteric Marx, which admits of an uninvolved
interpretation conducive to contemporary Marx-reconstructers, among others.
The dialectical Marx remains hidden behind the evolutionist Marx, who employs
a 'logical-historical' mode of argumentation in his main work and thereby
gives credence to a marxist 'science of History'. Marx himself was
responsible for this popularised version of his theory, in that he modified
his dialectical presentation increasingly to a 'logical-historical' theory.

Above all, Marx wanted to have a political effect with his theory.
Although he states in several places that he never made compromises to
vulgar understanding, the way his work was received. gave him cause to
think twice, to avoid further disappointment. The Critique
of 1859 did not exactly take the world by storm.

Biskamp himself said to me, he doesn't see the "à quoi
bon"; I expected attacks or criticism, but not to be fully ignored, which
must also significantly impair sales. ... In America /iv) the first book
has been extensively discussed by the entire German press. from New York
to New Orleans. I am afraid only that it is held to be too theoretical
for the working public there ... (Marx to Engels 22.7.1859, Marx to Lassalle
6.11.1859 B100)

Such reactions, no doubt, moved Marx to "popularise as much as possible"
(Preface to the first edition of Capital). A deeper ground
for the popularisations - which are simultaneously historicising vulgarisations
- is Marx's own "methodological unsureness"(3))
(in spite of the imperturbable calm with which marxists talk of 'Marx's
materialist method').

What could be more popular than a theory which implies that history,
(in the last instance?) is on our side? If a dialectical theory is
to reveal the contradictoriness of the peculiar object, which is to be
superseded and annulled, if at all, by the conscious act of a revolutionary
subject, an evolutionary theory lightens the task considerably by suggesting
that the revolutionary subject has only to release the trip-lever in history
to unleash the potential inherent in the historical development brought
about by capitalism. The ripened fruit needs only to be plucked from
the tree; and conversely, one has to sit back and wait for the fruit to
ripen.

With the critique of the teleological tendentiousness of an evolutionary
theory, marxism could regard itself as having freed itself from a pernicious
illusion. This liberation would lead - if consistently pursued -
to an unearthing of the esoteric, 'dialectical' Marx, whose critical potential
has never, in the relatively long history of marxism, been realised.
As the debate in and around marxism now stands, the 'dialectical' Marx
remains unpopular, one could say, almost completely unknown and disregarded.
Instead, the evolutionary Marx has been cut down to size: there is no necessary
evolution towards socialism, but one can employ some Marxian categories
in a 'science of History', or a 'critical sociology' of social change.
This capitulation of critical theory to historiography and sociology is
not without its sociological explanations (which do not interest us here).
Some have remained committed socialists politically, and pursue a marxist
sociology /v) or historiography in theoretical endeavour.

With words one can only ever achieve so much. Nevertheless, the
words contained in the following pages are placed to stem the tide in marxism
and all theories with critical pretensions; a perilous enterprise, considering
the fury with which some waves thunder in to shore and the mighty undertow
of ancient, sluggish undercurrents. The thesis is the following: Only a
DIALECTICAL
theory can be critical; all else, on closer inspection, turns out to be
froth and foam. This claim can only be evaluated by studying the
entire presentation offered here.

1. The Marxian System Fragment, its Reconstruction
and Extension

The work concerned is a critique of economic categories or,
if you like, the system of bourgeois economy critically presented.
It is simultaneously presentation of the system and through the presentation
a critique of it. ... The whole is divided into 6 Books. 1) On Capital
(contains some preliminary chapters) 2) On Landed Property 3) On Wage-Labour
4) On State 5) International Trade 6) World Market. I can of course
not avoid taking critical notice of other economists occasionally, especially
polemics against Ricardo ... (Marx to Lassalle 22.2.1858 B80f)

With these words, Marx describes, as in several other places(4)
the entire system initially outlined by him in September 1857 during the
writing of the introduction to an enormous rough draft. Striking
is that the critique is to be performed through presentation of the system,
already a hint at dialectics. In March of 1858 Marx writes again
to Lassalle:

It is in no way my intention to work out all six books into
which I divide the whole to an equal extent; but rather in the latter three
to give merely the basic outlines, whereas in the first three, which contain
the basic economic development proper, elaborations are not always to be
avoided ... (Marx to Lassalle 11.3.1858 B87)

My purpose here is not to investigate in detail the extent to which Marx
executed or altered the plan of his system. Instead, I want to make
some elementary observations about this planned /vi) system as a prelude
to outlining a research program which has grown out of the attempt to reconstruct
the Marxian drafts to this system. A point which cannot be over-emphasised
is that the system aims at "critically presenting" a theoretical object
existing in the bourgeois epoch. The system aims at presenting "for
the first time an important view of social relations scientifically."(Marx
to Lassalle 12.11.1858 B93 my emphasis) We are thus dealing with a proposed
critical science of "bourgeois economy" (including the state).

The rough outline of six books is elaborated, in accordance with the
above-quoted view that the latter three books are only to provide the broad
strokes, in more detailed plans for the first book. To my knowledge,
extensive plans for the books on landed property and wage-labour do not
exist (cf. however the discussion of the change of plan below). The
book on capital has the following structure:
a) Capital in general

b) The Section on Competition "or the action of the many capitals on one
another"(B87)
c) The Section on the Credit System
d) The Section on Share-capital(5)

As a rough structure which was only partially filled out with drafts,
even this articulation of the first book cannot be regarded as a blueprint
strictly to be observed. In particular, the place of competition
within the plan for the first book was never concretised with a draft.
In the envisaged work to be published under the title of Capital,
only the section on capital in general was to be covered. The plan for
six books thereby shrinks in the years from 1859, when the Critique
was published, to 1863, when work on the drafts for Capital was
properly begun, to merely the first section of the first book. In
this vein Marx writes to Kugelmann in December of 1862; the manuscripts
for Capital, which are yet to be written, are described by Marx
simply as the "copying out and final filing down for printing" of a manuscript
entitled /vii) "On the Critique of Political Economy", written between
1861 and 1863.

It indeed comprises only that which should form the third chapter
of the first section, namely, 'capital in general'. It therefore does not
include the competition of the capitals or the credit system. ... It is
the quintessence (together with the first part(6))
and the development of the following parts (with the exception perhaps
of the relation of the various state forms to the various economic structures
of society) could be easily carried out by others on the basis of that
already provided. (Marx to Kugelmann 28.12.1862 B113)

One could say today that Marx overestimated both his own powers and those
of others. Not only did Marx not come to publishing his own theory
of 'Capital in general', but no one else has ever ventured into an extended
work on the remaining parts of his system. The reference to the difficulty
of working out the relation of the various forms of state to the various
economic structures remains enigmatic. According to the editors of
the Grundrisse (cf. G p.X), the most extensive plan for the book
on State consists of merely three printed lines:

(state and bourgeois society - taxes, or the existence of the
unproductive classes - the state debt - the population - the state towards
the outside ... (G175)

The last-mentioned theme belongs already to the fifth book, on international
trade. With regard to the present work, which has as one of its objects
the bourgeois form of state, these remarks by Marx are of no positive help
in the contemporary theoretical task of a state theory. The same
holds for a work on competition, belonging to the "eventual continuation"
of Capital. Despite hints in the draft for Volume 3 of Capital,
and despite comments on competition in the first volume (cf. IV below),
one is confronted with an autonomous task of research in any contemporary
attempt at completing a systematic theory of bourgeois society. No
amount of Marx-research will be able to uncover what Marx had in mind for
the unwritten - even in draft form - parts of his system.

The title for the whole system - System of Bourgeois Economy - the references
to competition in the rough draft for Volume 3 of /viii) Capital, as well
as the above-cited plan for the book on state, suggest a rather economic
work. The present work diverges from these Marxian intentions in
a way to be explained in following subsections of this preface.

As to whether Marx ever actually gave up his plan of 6 books extending
as far as a theory of state, international trade and world market, the
view of Rosdolsky is of interest. Referring to the second detailed
plan Marx works on from 1864-65 for Capital, he notes that

these books (the latter three ME) were never really 'given
up', that is, that the themes falling within their area were never assimilated
fully into the second structure of the work, but rather remained basically
reserved to its 'eventual continuation'. (Rosdolsky 1977 p.23;1968 I p.39)

This is to be contrasted with the plan changes concerning the first three
books. The plan for Volume 3 of Capital which Marx writes
to Engels on 30.4.1868 suggests the interpretation that at least aspects
of the section on competition are incorporated in the treatment of the
average rate of profit and that the books on landed property, wage labour
and "the three classes" (referred to in a structure to be found in the
Grundrisse
G175) are to gain at least a condensed presentation in the seventh and
last part of Capital Volume 3. This last part, containing the investigation
of the "three revenues" and their corresponding classes, is to end with

the class struggle as conclusion, in which the movement and
dissolution of the whole shit dissolves ... (B172)

It is an undecidable question to what extent this analysis of revenue forms,
a draft of which first appears in the 1861-63 manuscripts. can be regarded
as a modified concretisation of the second and third books of the originally
planned Marxian system(7). Whatever
new insights are to be won in future philological investigations of Marx's
writings, one must conclude that Marx's project of a critique of bourgeois
society, however one may interpret this project, remained unfinished(8),
indeed no more than a skeleton. Even the skeleton was left as a mere
torso(9) - two published volumes,
A
Contribution to the critique of Political Economy /ix) and Volume I
(in two German and one French edition prepared by Marx himself) - and the
'arms and legs' of voluminous unpublished manuscripts(10)
to Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, as well as to the historical presentation
of the theory, Theories of Surplus Value. As for the projected
'flesh and blood' of an analysis of the bourgeois superstructure, alluded
to in the notorious 1859 Preface as "the social, political and spiritual
process of life"(11), not even a
systematic plan was left behind by Marx.

In the 1859 Preface, which publicly announces the system of six books,
Marx is misleading about the state of readiness of his work. He claims
that "the whole material lies before me in the form of monographs"(Crit
19; MEW13 7), although the last three books are scarcely represented in
these monographs, comprising excerpt notebooks from the years 1851-52(12)
and the rough draft of 1857-58, first published in 1939 and 1941 under
the title provided by the editors of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in
Moscow, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie.

That Marx's system remains a fragmentary skeleton has not been seriously
taken into account by the marxist tradition, and especially not by English-speaking
marxism. An index for the infantile state of English-speaking Marx-research
is that the Grundrisse first appeared in English translation as
late as 1973. Its publication stimulated the printing of a flurry
of articles, which however quickly gave way to boredom with the topic.
Under the bland formulation 'Marx's main work', Capital is treated
almost without exception as a more or less completed work. This illusion
of completeness, with or without the admission that various special themes,
such as a theory of capitalist crisis or of the credit system remain contradictory
or incomplete, and the almost total lack of a critical evaluation of the
one volume published by Marx and other manuscripts to Capital, reflects
an apparently impenetrable complacency and unwillingness of English-speaking
marxism to immerse itself in the minute details of Marx (not marxist) research.
Even the long and extensive debate on the valve theory engaged in by a
few marxists, and followed by a couple more, in Britain and the USA taps
around in the dark or completely ignores the issue of the dialectical character
of the /x) esoteric strand in Marx's value theory.(cf. III below).
Perhaps a perturbing sign for an English-speaking marxism which, through
the experience of the New Left, has tried to distance itself(13)
from the official marxism of the Soviet Union is that, at least on the
question of there being no need for a minute fundamental reassessment of
Marx's system fragment, they are, through either disinterest or dogmatism,
in fundamental agreement. The historico-empirical attitude or the
mathematico-logical inclinations of English-speaking marxists have by and
large precluded any minute and radically uncompromising re-evaluation of
Marx's writings.

In the notes provided by the editors of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism
in Moscow and Berlin to the first volume of Kapital (MEW23), the books
projected by Marx on state, international trade and world market are silently
written out of even ideal existence. After mentioning the planned
six books of the 1859 Preface, the editors write:

In the course of further work Marx decided to construct his
whole (sic) work according to the plan which he had earlier worked out
for the section 'Capital in general' with its three subsections. (MEW23
845)

This statement partly confirms the interpretation given above of Marx's
letter of 30 April 1868, according to which the first three books are taken
up in modified form in the three volumes of Capital. Following
the last-quoted passage is a quotation from a letter from Marx to Kugelmann
of 13.10.1866, in which Marx refers to his "whole work" as falling into
the structure of the three volumes of Capital, as published, plus
a fourth book, "on the history of the theory". The editors could
sensibly put forward the suggestion that Marx, in 1866, had already abandoned
any intention of writing the last three books of his planned system.
They present the matter with apologetic slyness however, as if the whole
system were now somehow taken up into the three books of capital.
The new plan of Marx in any case cannot be represented as bringing new
contents under the structure of the analysis of 'Capital in general', but
as an abandonment of the previous systematic structure. The editors,
of course, do not underline the fragmentary character of capital itself.
To the /xi) asserted completed construction of socialism in the Eastern
Bloc corresponds the asserted completeness of Marx's system. It is
inconceivable that Soviet marxism question the theological underpinnings
of the state religion. Although English-speaking marxism of late
vigorously repudiates any uncritical acceptance of the social system in
the East, it has not yet shaken, through an exacting, but rejuvenating,
reassessment of Marx's critique of political economy, the petrified image
of a solid foundation of marxism. In some cases, the stony image
is adhered to, in others, a net is cast in entirely new waters. Neither
attitude is able to bring an ossified marxism to life.

The kind of theory put together by marxists more often than not resembles
the wedding robes of Penelope, who unravels the weaving of the previous
day in the night, and starts every day afresh. There are ever new
facets and events in the phenomenal world which draw the attention of some
marxist theoretician or other, and cause him/her to devote energy to an
obviously undone task. Why this task is given priority is determined
in the first instance by personal interest. When pressed for a justification
as to the critical relevance of the study, the answer often runs as follows:
some organisation, social movement or group urgently needs empirical knowledge
in some area for their 'struggle'. Or recourse is taken to the significance
of a tradition or author (whose standing and relevance remain unquestioned).
A marxist theoretician, like anyone else, cannot jump over his/her own
shadow. This fact notwithstanding, one could hope that the question
of what critique is, and how it relates to socialist revolution (for which
the marxist waits since many years past) could be posed for a marxist.

In the present work, the object of attention is not the Marxian oeuvre
itself. The starting point is rather the project of a systematic
theory of the bourgeois form of society, which relates directly to Marx
insofar as his writings on the critique of political economy form the indispensable
theoretical raw material for a reconstructed capital-analysis. Marx's
theory is the best in a long series of attempts to analyse capitalism.
This reconstructed capital-analysis, in turn, serves as foundation for
a theory of the surface of capitalist economy and of the bourgeois /xii)
superstructure. There is already a marked change of accent from Marx's
intentions, in that not the "system of bourgeois economy" is the object
of analysis, but rather the totality of the bourgeois form of society.
The structure of the total system, of which the present work comprises
a version(14) of the fifth,
sixth and eighth sections, is as follows:

I Commodities and Money
II The Capital - Wage-labour Relation and Capitalist Production
III Interest and the Revenue-form
IV The Circulation and Reproduction Process of Capital
V The Surface of Capitalist Economy: Competitive Freedom and Compulsion
VI The State as Leviathan
VII Bourgeois Subjectivity and Private Life
VIII The State as Expression of the Will of the Citizens: Bourgeois
Public Life and Democracy
IX Culture and Aesthetic Experience
X Ideology and Critical Social Philosophy

The first four headings cover the structure of a reconstructed capital-analysis
(contained in the Appendix under joint authorship). In following
subsections of this preface, a more detailed description of some parts
of the system will be given. At first sight, the challenge of offering
a contribution to a system appears to be beset with insuperable difficulties.
Apart from the general distaste for thinking systematically, the debate
in and around marxism over Marx's system fragment, even one hundred years
after Marx's death, is marked by severe divergences(15)
of interpretation on the one hand and by unshakeable complacency[16]
on the other. The present work does not deal with the disputes around
the critique of political economy directly. It is founded on the
Sydney-Konstanz group's reconstruction of Capital (cf. the Appendix),
which has crystallised out of research and discussions starting with a
research project organised by Mike Roth in Konstanz in 1971. Genuine
critique aside. no one will be able to accuse us of putting forward half-baked
ideas in our concise reconstruction. Reference will be made throughout
in the main text to this reconstruction, as well as to Marx's texts. /xiii)

Our reconstruction, like all scientific argumentation, is open to criticism.
This criticism presupposes of course the rare reader who is willing to
take the trouble of mastering the argumentation and uncovering any defects
therein. The attempt to build on the capital-analysis in the areas
of competition and the state has shed light also on the fundamental concepts
of the capital-analysis in connection with the aim of grounding a critique
of the bourgeois forms. This form-analysis does not seek to 'reduce'
superstructural phenomena to economic phenomena, nor to 'explain' superstructural
phenomena causally in terms of economic factors. Instead, it aims
at grasping the whole in thought. at laying bare the 'inner
band' constituting this whole and at showing in which sense humans are
not subject of their own social life and history, and the consequences
thereof.

The present work is a philosophically oriented critique of two spheres
of modern bourgeois reality, not a treatise on economics, nor a sociological
study. Qualitative form is the focus of attention and not objective
economic (or other) 'laws of motion' (which in any case are a hoax).
The analysis makes no claim to being able to chart the historical development
of bourgeois society. This latter activity of Understanding is to
be contrasted with the speculative Reason of critique(17),
which modern social science thought it had banished forever under a cloud
of disgrace. In its fundamental characteristics and through all the immense
variation in particularity thrown up by bourgeois history, the bourgeois
form of society is subject - according to the programmatic claim - to the
same essential critique as when Marx published in 1867 the first volume
of his theory of the "present society"(CI 21;KI 16). In conceiving
this work as the second part of a form-analysis, I have without doubt diverged
from Marx's intention, in Capital, of explicating "the economic
law of motion of modern society"(Cl 20, KI 15). There is nevertheless
a line of development in Marx's critique of political economy, starting
with the infamous and neglected value-form analysis of the third subsection
of the first chapter of Capital and with corresponding texts in
the Grundrisse, the Critique and the first edition of Capital,
which although entirely at odds with the exoteric labour theory of value,
can be fruitfully interpreted and reconstructed(18).
In the /xiv) work of reconstruction - and self-evidently of necessity in
the work of extension - it cannot be a matter of the juxtaposition of Marx
quotations or the recounting of argumentation, but of developing an autonomous
argumentation which, whilst owing a great deal to Marx, ultimately has
to be assessed on its own merits.

2. General Methodological Remarks

In this subsection, an outline of general methodological conceptions will
be provided. The following remarks do not constitute an argumentation,
but rather provide rules for a dialogue (Roth 1976) between systematic
thinking and everyday consciousness. Since as methodological remarks
the contents of the presentation will be initially abstracted from, only
the most general impression of the methodological way of proceeding can
be given. In the following subsection, where the kernel thoughts
which constitute the guiding thread for the reconstruction of the capital-analysis
are set out, certain contents will be briefly discussed.

In recent times, the efforts to reconsider the Marxian theory as a system
in which concepts are derived one from the other, has not found especial
favour, particularly not in English-speaking marxism. Even in West
Germany. the spiritual home of Ableitungsmarxismus, the approach
enjoyed only an ephemeral flowering. Part of the debate centred on
the conflict between a logical and a logical-historical mode of presentation.
The representatives of the 'logical' approach were in the main accused
of operating with dry, abstract concepts which have a restricted validity
in analysing the historically given capitalist societies. The abstract,
bloodless categories, according to this position, should take on some colour
by incorporating historical material arising in overabundance in every
phase of capitalist development. The defenders of a logical position
maintained on the contrary that little clarity about the status of the
categorial development in Marx's Capital has been won, especially
not by the proponents of a logical-historical position. The relationship
between dialectical transitions in the capital-analysis and historical
material, When not treated in a comically dogmatic and cursory /xv) way
by referring to Engels' (in any case contradictory) remarks on the subject,
has not received any satisfactory treatment at the hands of the logical-historicists.
Here, a more detailed discussion of this debate cannot be gone into(19).

The doctrinaire defenders of a derivationist approach have been unable
to give a clear and plausible account about how a 'logical' theory can
be constructed. This inability has served to reinforce the prejudices
of 'common sense' marxists. Here we clear away a few of the most
obvious misconceptions. With the term 'logical', everyday conception
usually associates a way of argumentation bound by strict rules in which
one step follows from the preceding one with necessity. Mathematics
is taken as the paradigm for such an argumentation. For those allergic
to mathematics, it can be said that systematic thinking does not work with
a mathematical form of proof (although it does make strenuous demands on
the reader). Not only are the contents of a systematic social theory
entirely different from mathematics - the one deals with the qualitative
forms of social relations and phenomena, the other with space and time
- but also the form of presentation. As Hegel points out in the preface
to the Phenomenology of Spirit and elsewhere, the mathematical form
of proof - contrary to a popular misconception - possesses no inner necessity
but only the reassurance that the steps of the proof lead eventually to
the desired result, namely, to the theorem which is to be proven.
As opposed to this, systematic thinking argues for each transition in the
presentation not by the application of axioms and rules of deduction, but
by making clear why the presentation cannot come to rest at the systematic
level already reached.

A further difference of systematic thinking from mathematical or other
types of logical thinking is its relationship to the phenomenality of the
social world. This phenomenality is not negated and replaced by axioms
and formal rules of deduction. Rather, the initial and further development
of the presentation depends on it taking account of the contents of everyday
consciousness(20). The latter
is not abstractly negated by systematic thinking, but enters into a dialogue
with it. Hegel formulates this as follows: /xvi)

Against that therefore, which consciousness declares within
itself to be the in itself or the true, we have the yardstick which it
itself erects and against which it measures its knowledge ... Consciousness
gives its yardstick in itself and the investigation will be thereby a comparison
of itself with itself. (Ph.G 77,76)

The yardstick is not dragged in from the outside, as a normative Ought
which is to blame reality for its shortcomings on the basis of an a priori
moral code, but is an immanent "comparison of itself with itself".

At the beginning of the presentation stand the proponent of the dialectical
theory and the opponent, who has a practical, everyday knowledge of life
in modern bourgeois society. The proponent takes certain elements
of this everyday consciousness in forming the first concepts of the analysis.
In doing this, the proponent does not deny the opponent his/her everyday
knowledge, but makes the claim - indispensable for the construction of
the system - to be allowed to determine the systematic level at which the
contents and arguments of everyday consciousness may be brought into play.
So far, this sounds deceptively simple for anyone acquainted with the endless
literature on 'Marx's method', Hegel's speculative logic, or with the methodology
of empirical social research.

With the construction of the first concepts of the presentation through
an investigation of certain contents of everyday knowledge, the language
of analysis is inaugurated. The opponent, who has followed through
the construction of these concepts, must now continue the dialogue with
the proponent by paying regard to the language of analysis, i.e. to the
conceptual categories, developed to that point. The objections formulated
by everyday consciousness now have to take the appropriate form of conceptually
articulated objections. Everyday consciousness feels itself a little
hemmed in, but may nevertheless abide by the rules of the dialogue, and
see what comes next. Everyday consciousness is raised beyond its
prosaic level - it becomes gebildet and is aufgehoben.
Everyday consciousness is gradually taken up and dissolved in the systematic
presentation without ever having been negated. The aim of systematic
thinking is to achieve a knowledge of the inner connection /xvii) of the
bourgeois form of social totality which can be mediated to everyday consciousness
by way of the presentation. The presentation comes to a close when
the general phenomenality of this social totality has found a place within
the presentation at which it has been conceptualised to the satisfaction
of the opponent. Everyday consciousness thereby can agree that its
general contents have been taken into account by systematic thinking whilst
simultaneously gaining insight into the inner coherence in the essential
structure of bourgeois social relations, defracted by the chaos of impressions
and experiences of everyday life. Dialectical thinking is a coming
to rest amongst the chaos which continues to exist as an inchoate mass
of confused fragments. Everyday consciousness maintains its validity
in daily life in practically dealing with the multi-faceted world with
which it is confronted.

The first categories of the analysis initiate the investigation of the
essence of capitalist society, an essence which the analysis claims to
have found within the anatomy of capitalist economy. These first
fundamental concepts are the basis upon which the whole conceptual structure
arises, and are thus crucial for the presentation. They formulate
the inner thread which can be drawn through the whole analysis and which
allows the bourgeois form of society to be conceptualised precisely as
a TOTALITY. Systematic thinking reveals bourgeois society to be
a connected whole in a sense which can only be shown by the presentation
itself. This is simultaneously a ground for thinking in a system.
According to its claim, the real object, the bourgeois form of society,
is indeed a connected whole, a system, which can only be successfully comprehended
when thinking likewise constructs conceptually the connection between the
parts.

The true is the whole. The whole however is only the
essence which completes itself through its development.(Ph.G 24)

Formulated in another way, systematic thinking can be conceived as the
investigation of the general form of society which arises necessarily on
the basis of the indirect Vergesellschaftung of labour through the
commodity form. The generality of the theory as form-analysis arises
from the fact that the phenomenality /xviii) of bourgeois society is not
uniquely determined by the essential relations of production but is nevertheless
unique in its form - and that not as an 'ideal type' from which reality
diverges to a greater or lesser extent.(cf. further below, on epochal validity).

If on the one hand systematic thinking does not abstractly negate the
phenomenality of everyday life, on the other, it does not surrender the
stringency of a conceptual development. It exerts itself to make
the transitions from one level of the analysis to the next convincing and
unarbitrary. The incorporation of new elements of everyday consciousness
into the analysis does not happen capriciously, but is prepared by the
preceding level of the analysis.

Scientific knowing however demands rather the surrender of
oneself to the life of the object or, in other words, to have before oneself
and express the inner necessity of the object. (Ph.G 52)

The necessity of the movement of the presentation is bound to the concept
of CONTRADICTION, which gives systematic theory its DIALECTICAL
character. The first concepts of the presentation articulate a DOUBLEDNESS
in reality consisting of two moments, PARTICULARITY and UNIVERSALITY,
which are MUTUALLY DEPENDENT and simultaneously SUNDERED
from one another. This sundering means that each moment contains
within it the implicit claim to be the WHOLE; the moments are thus
in this sense MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. The contradiction can only
exist in reality in that one moment is SUBORDINATED to the other.
The movement of the presentation is the movement of the contradiction between
the two moments. In part, the analysis is the investigation of the
DOMINATION
OF THE ONE MOMENT, UNIVERSALITY OVER THE OTHER. In other parts,
the analysis is of the FORM OF MOVEMENT OF PARTICULARITY in the
shadow of universality. In yet other parts, the analysis is of the
forms in which the two moments strive for RECONCILIATION and IDENTITY
with one another. Identity, however, could only be achieved if the
contradiction ceased to exist in reality, in which case, it would no longer
make sense to speak of two separated moments. The CONTRADICTION BETWEEN
UNIVERSALITY AND PARTICULARITY is thus the INNER MOTOR of the
presentation, which at the same time /xix) constitutes the INNER BAND.
The revelation of this contradiction in ALL its ramifications is the CRITIQUE
of the bourgeois form of society(21).

In this way the dialogue with everyday consciousness, expressible in
Hegelian terms as a phenomenology, is also an immanent movement, driven
by the necessity of the concept. In the attempts at the reconstruction
of a critical social philosophy, the one aspect of the argumentation should
not be played out at the expense of the other. The systematic presentation
is neither a logical deduction of one concept from another, nor is it a
mere stringing together of everyday phenomena in a convenient order which
does not exceed the self-understanding of everyday consciousness.

The systematic presentation brings social phenomena to their concept.
The concept itself is first developed in dialogue with the contents of
everyday consciousness. In this sense, systematic thinking is a constructivist
methodology(22). It builds
its language of analysis up in a stepwise dialogical development.
The bringing of a phenomenon to its concept is simultaneously the demonstration
of its place within the total connection of the social phenomenality.
At the same time, this bringing of a phenomenon to its concept is strenuous
and demands an attention to the formulation of the conceptual language
of the analysis as well as to the distinction between systematic levels.
Libertarian and lazy elements in everyday consciousness experience a strong
disinclination at this thought, which however is not insuperable if consciousness
makes clear to itself that the effort will not be wasted.

To refrain from ones own interference with the immanent rhythm
of the concepts, not to intervene with caprice and other acquired wisdom,
this reservedness is itself an essential moment of attentiveness to the
concept. (Ph.G 56)

Although systematic thinking remains in dialogue with everyday consciousness,
its claim to be able to determine the place at which the moments of everyday
consciousness are brought into the presentation can seem to everyday consciousness
to do violence to it. The demands of the systematic presentation can lead
to the separation of moments which for natural consciousness 'naturally'
belong together. As real imagined object, the concept formed of /xx)
it by bracketing certain aspects, for everyday consciousness, seems poor
and unreal. The real object appears dismembered. This appearance
of dismembering, this "activity of separating" (Ph.G 36), arises in the
contrast between the natural connections, including causal relations, assumed
by everyday consciousness in daily life and the unfamiliar connections
which systematic thinking exposes through its determinations by reflection
(Reflexionsbestimmungen). To everyday consciousness, the inner
connection constructed by separating its moments appears alien and fictitious.
The former can only convince itself of the adequacy and justice of the
systematic ordering and dissecting by following through the argumentation
itself to see if in fact an inner connection is successfully constructed.
The strangeness of the methodological dissection is to be compensated for
by the insight into the essential relations, which strips away the natural
self-evidence of accepted everyday phenomena and forms of consciousness.
Everyday consciousness is shaken by its encounter with systematic thinking,
and may resist the attempt to reconstruct its apparent obviousnesses.
It often does this by refusing to accept the rules of the systematic dialogue,
and counterposes its own idea of what social theory should look like (Marx's
'materialist method', 'history', 'concrete analysis', 'discourse analysis',
'semiotic delinquency', etc. etc.). Through this stratagem, a dialogue
never gets off the ground. Well and good, there are lots of fascinating
things in the world, and one can't do everything. Systematic thinking
can only make clear its demand that everyday consciousness take leave of
the well-known and its preconceptions and give itself over to the unfolding
of the systematic argument. "Conversely, the individual has the right
to demand that science reaches the ladder to this standpoint to him/her."
(Ph.G 29)

The final question to which we turn in this subsection is that concerning
the epochal validity of the analysis. Against the astounding rush
of historical change and specificity, for naive consciousness it seems
daring to claim as theoretical object an epochally valid form of society.
Systematic thinking enters into dialogue and dispute with everyday consciousness
as it exists in contemporary, modern society. It claims to conceptualise
the specific form of bourgeois society by relating to certain moments /xxi)
of everyday consciousness in a characteristic way. Everyday consciousness
itself knows only its present form, and what it has heard of history, and
cannot itself select those elements which possess an epochally universal
validity. This selection is a task left for systematic thinking.
It must be able to construct its categories in such a way that not only
the definite limited phase or only a particular society is conceptualised.
The systematic presentation is exposed to a test of its validity in every
historical phase and every particular society through the reader's attempt
to make sense of the argument. Although bourgeois society is characterised
by continuous rapid and sometimes momentous change, systematic thinking
claims to have grasped the general forms within which this change takes
place. The forms themselves are universal. Not only the particular
situation (structure of institutions, state of technology, concentration
of capital, etc. etc.) as it actually exists at a specific point of time
is of relevance for systematic thinking, but above all the forms of
consciousness, which may represent a demand on reality rather than
encapsulating the actually existing state of affairs. Forms of consciousness
are not tied to the here and now of the historically particular situation,
but can refer to both past and future. The forms of consciousness
refer not only to how in a particular society the social and private life
is actually organised but also to how consciousness thinks reality could
or should be. This consciousness of Should and Could exists in the
present and forms part of the material with which systematic thinking disputes.
Systematic thinking aims at grasping the general social form of the social
spheres, economy, state and private life, as well as their relation to
one another. Their particular shape and relation to one another can
alter historically without invalidating the systematic analysis.

Epochal validity refers immediately to a philosophical theme.
Whereas sociology, economic and other social sciences concern themselves
with particular constellations of phenomena observed within definite co-ordinates
of time and space, philosophy occupies itself with the universal character
of our social situation. The historical birth of bourgeois society
was simultan- /xxii) eously the period in which classical bourgeois social
philosophy attempted to give an account of bourgeois society per se.
In doing this, it concerned itself with questions of morality, ethics and
the general character of capitalist economy. The dissolution of philosophy
in the various social sciences has meant that sight has been lost of central
universal socio-philosophical themes. Certain key phenomena nevertheless
recur again and again in various disguises in philosophy and the social
sciences, even if they are today quickly gone over in favour of more particular,
context-bound questions, or held at arm's length with a positivist scepticism.
One question which has been suppressed more and more by philosophy and
social science, to a point where most academics no longer see any point
whatsoever in posing it, is: What is capital? Economics talks continually
about capital, and does very well even in its lack of being able to ground
one of its basic concepts. A similar remark holds for the question: What
is bourgeois freedom? Sociology fashions the question into a problem
which can be treated by empirical methods, and gives at most definitions
of what is meant by the term. Philosophy handles the question in
ethics and finds itself incapable of providing a form-determinate concept.
This incapacity is intimately bound to the failure of philosophy to adequately
conceptualise private property. Classical bourgeois philosophy operated
in a problematic inseparable from that of political economy. Since
the two have parted company, neither is able to provide a concept of private
property; they mutually hinder one another.

A further external indication that a critical social theory concerns
itself with central, epochally valid categories is the necessity of a dispute
with alternative theories and partial theories during the course of the
presentation. In this dispute, the alternative theories are treated
as aspects of everyday consciousness, or more precisely, as attempts to
work up everyday consciousness or aspects thereof into an understanding
of itself. In the centre of this dispute stands the consideration
of a correct conceptualisation of the 'free market' capitalist economy,
the bourgeois-democratic state, the private life of the bourgeois individual,
and the relation between them. In this way, systematic /xxiii) thinking
carries on a dialogue not only with the naive conceptions which spring
literally out of everyday life, but also and especially, with opposed,
more or less elaborated theoretical positions. The latter dialogue
represents also the greater exertion for systematic thinking, because elaborated
theories make pretensions to scientific legitimacy and therefore enjoy
a following which is prepared to argue against or dismiss the arguments
of systematic thinking. "It is however far more difficult to bring
fixed thoughts into motion than sensuous consciousness." (Ph.G 37) If one
proceeds from the conception of an ideal speech situation, one could take
the attitude, let the fisticuffs begin, and let the better position win.
The present work is called an outline partly because it does not try to
fight out every skirmish; rather, it sounds a battle cry.

An explication of the object of systematic thinking, the relation of
the presentation at hand to the Marxian theory, and a description of the
whole system into which the present work fits will be provided in the following
subsections.

3. Value-form Analytic Reconstruction of the Capital-Analysis

The theoretical object of the capital-analysis, as understood in our efforts
at reconstruction, is the capitalist form of social material reproduction.
In theoretically investigating this object, the analysis is simultaneously
a critique of bourgeois economic categories, in that it lays bare the contradictoriness
of this form of material reproduction. We will return to the theme
of 'contradictoriness' below. The capital-analysis investigates the
forms and process of capitalist economic objectivity. This analysis
of a form-determinate objectivity is to be complemented by an investigation
of the forms and action of economic subjectivity, in the competition-analysis
(see IV below).

Form-analysis is to be distinguished from the predominant understanding
of historical-materialism as a theory of historical development. Adorno
polemicised against this conception of social theory, which can be found
also in the writings of the founders of scientific socialism: xxiv)

It was a matter of the deification of history also with the
atheist Hegelians Marx and Engels. The primacy of the economy is
supposed to ground with historical rigour the happy ending as immanent
to it; the economic process is supposed to produce the political relations
of domination and revolutionise them to the point of a compulsive liberation
from the compulsion of the economy. (Adorno 1966 p.313)

Modern marxism and other critical theories cannot be regarded as having
freed themselves from some variant or other of a mechanics of history.
Such theory has no way of intervening in history as an explicit critique
of consciousness which could initiate a movement leading away from the
present form of society. Without this explicit critique, consciousness
will never see the sense of putting the forms into question.

Developmental theory can be understood in two senses: firstly, as a
theory of the progression of class societies from epoch to epoch, and secondly,
as a theory of capitalist development within the bourgeois epoch(23).
Both these variants of Histomat are well represented within marxism.
The first owes its classical formulation to Engels' Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State, which served as basic text for a series
of vulgarisations within German Social Democracy, and which was elaborated
on by Stalin in On Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
The second variant is represented by massive amounts of contemporary marxist
literature, and finds its classical formulation perhaps with Hilferding's
Finance
Capital and Sweezy's Theory of Capitalist Development.
A competing developmental theory, both trans-epochal and within the bourgeois
epoch, is Habermas' and his school's proposed reconstruction of historical
materialism(24).

Form-analysis, in marking itself off from developmental theory, takes
as its starting point the striking autonomy of the argumention in Capital
when understood as a systematic argumentation aiming at the conceptualisation
of epochal categories. The debate between systematic theory and developmental
theory finds a firm ground for contestation in the interpretation of the
Marxian capital-analysis. There, the decisive point is a clarification
of the distinction between a logical and a logical-historical mode /xxv)
of presentation. The theorist who has occupied himself most intensively
with this question is Hans-Georg Backhaus. He has shed light upon
the methodological problems of Marx's texts in relation to the perplexing
phenomenon of the various versions (published by Marx himself) of the Marxian
value theory. According to Backhaus, of the four versions of the
Marxian form-analysis of commodities and money, the first, which appeared
in the Critique of 1859, presents the value theory most consistently
as a dialectical, 'logical' argumentation. The logical analysis is
clearly separated from the historical, which latter comprises only the
last two pages of the analysis of commodities and money in the first chapter
of the Critique.

In this pseudo-historical appendix of the first version of
the Marxian value theory however one must see the germ of its later 'historicisation'
and 'vulgarisation' by Marx himself, above all however by the late Engels
and the marxist interpreters. (Backhaus 1981 p.156f)

This statement by Backhaus is the result of a painstaking study of Marxian
and Engelsian texts as well as of letters written by both. Backhaus
shows that even Engels did not consistently represent a logical-historical
interpretation, but rather oscillated from an historical-logical position
in the 1859 review of the Critique, to a logical position in the
Konspekt
and Anti-Dühring to a final logical-historical position in
the foreword and appendix to the third volume of capital of 1894-95.
The Engelsian theory of simple commodity production developed in this appendix
can be viewed as a consistent conclusion to the tendency towards historicisation
already present in the value theory as presented by Marx in the second
edition of Capital. Backhaus also shows that Marx's silence
on Engels 1859 review, which confusedly outlines a logical-historical mode
of presentation, can plausibly be interpreted as an unsureness and unclarity
on Marx's part as to the distinguishing characteristics of his 'materialist'
manner of presentation as opposed to an Hegelian 'idealist' presentation.

It is of course not to be overlooked that he (Engels ME) feels
similar scruples to Marx with regard to 'dialectically won' results.
The central problem for their conceptual /xxvi) construction: how, on the
basis of a non-idealist 'scientific' theory, 'dialectically won' results
can he grounded, occupies both again and again. ... The Engelsian statements
on method in the 1859 review have scarcely anything in common with Marx's
actual procedure. If Marx did not 'tear up' or 'rectify' even this
passage of the review, then one can only see in this a further index for
the fact that he was not able to win any proper clarity about the distinctiveness
of his procedure. (Backhaus 'Materialien 4' 1979 pp.21f, 23)

It can easily be shown that the reference to historical data as an additional
means of proof for dialectical argumentation, at least in relation to the
value theory, reveals itself to be an empty, mythological construction.
Marx's unclarity about his own methodological mode of procedure and the
resultant multitude of versions of the value theory must be seen as the
primary source of vulgarisation and neglect of the niceties of the value
theory in the hands of Marx's interpreters.

After the appearance of the first version of the value theory, Marx
admits in a letter to Kugelmann that there must be "something defective
in the first presentation". (Marx to Kugelmann 13.10.1866) This admission
is connected with the disappointing reception of the Critique even
in the circle of political comrades. Wilhelm Liebkhecht commented
that he had never before "been so disappointed by a book" (Marx to Engels
22.7.1859). Such evidence leads Backhaus to the conclusion that

Very quickly after the appearance of the Critique, Marx must
have had the experience of not having been properly understood. (Backhaus
'Materialien 4' 1979 p.15)

Marx's disappointments at the reception of his work did not stop with the
appearance of the first edition of Capital Volume I in 1867.
We pursue this matter of how Marx's theory was immediately received in
order to highlight the difficulties with which Marx was confronted in having
his theory taken seriously at all. In particular, the story following
is instructive in showing how the stubbornness of editors and readers who
basically do not want to upset their prejudices tempts Marx to make a greater
effort to popularise - and thereby cut off access to the radical kernel
of /xxvii) his theory. The editors of the Marx-Engels Werke write:

The nine reviews by Engels of Marx's Capital hitherto
discovered were part of a plan worked out by Marx and Engels to counteract
a bourgeois 'conspiracy of silence' (directed against the Critique
ME). (Engels 1981 p.143 n.1)

The editors do not mention that not only the German Nationalökonomie
but by and large also the German workers' movement had ignored the Critique.
To avoid a recurrence of this fate, Marx and Engels organised the publication
of reviews in Germany and elsewhere, and had hopes of publishing a longer
review, in two parts, in a British magazine, The Fortnightly Review,
"founded in May 1865 by a group of bourgeois radicals"(MEW editors in Engels
1981 p.146). According to the editors,

For this review Marx and Engels repeatedly exchanged opinions
as to content and form, as can be seen from their correspondence.
Marx gave advice and wrote also variants for individual passages, which
Engels completely took up in the text. The article was to appear
under the name of Samuel Moore, a friend of Engels. (Engels 1981 p.146)

If one goes through the correspondence between Marx and Engels between
January and July 1868 (when Engels had finished writing the review), some
curious points come to light.

Marx had contact with a certain Prof. Beesly of the University of London,
who was closely associated with the First International.

Prof. Beesly, who is one of the triumvirate which secretly
runs this rag, has ... declared, he is "morally certain" (it depends on
him!) a criticism would be accepted. (Marx to Engels 8.1.1868)

In his letters to Marx of 16 and 23 January, Engels asks Marx's advice
concerning the review. The following sentences deserve attention:

In the first article I will probably be able to touch on the
money-system - although important for England - only fleetingly; otherwise
it will take up the whole article. If we could bring a second, then it
could still come in. What do you think? (Engels to Marx 23.1.1868)

In answer to this question, one finds only the sentence: xxviii)

As soon as your article for the 'Fortnightly' is at hand, Lafargue
can turn it into French for the 'Courier francais'. (Marx to Engels 1.2.1868)

Engels could not have found this answer very satisfying. He writes:

Although the matter concerning money is important and interesting,
also for England (?!), I think it is appropriate this time to let it fade
into the background; it would detract from the main topic and demand a
long discussion so that the English reader would even understand that it
is a matter of simple money as such, which s/he is used to imagining only
in its intertwining with credit money, etc. What do you think? (Engels
to Marx 2.2.1868)

In Engels' estimation, the "matter concerning money" is a secondary matter,
which "would detract from the main topic", namely, the surplus-value theory
as theory of class exploitation. The review he finally writes in
June 1868 indeed deals almost exclusively with the surplus-value theory,
and makes only a passing reference to the money theory:

(The first chapter of the first edition ME) contains a new
and very simple value- and money-theory, which is scientifically speaking
extremely interesting, which we however will leave out of consideration,
since for that which we hold to be the essence of Mr. Marx's views on capital,
it is on the whole secondary (!) (MEW16 289)

In this cursory way, Engels pushes Marx's "value- and money-theory" to
one side. Quite astounding is the description of the "value- and
money-theory" as "very simple". This description contradicts not
only Marx's self-estimation (Preface to the first edition Cl 18;KI 11),
but even Engels' estimation in a review he wrote on 12.10.1867 for the
Rheinische
Zeitung (which was never published). In this review Engels writes:

We add that, apart from the somewhat strongly dialectical matters
in the first forty pages, the book, despite all scientific rigour, is nonetheless
very easy to grasp... (Engels 1981 p.22)

It seems that Engels took an easy way out in the review for the 'Fortnightly'.
Perhaps not wanting to scare the English reader with a mention of dialectics.
he misrepresents the value and /xxix) money theory as "very simple".
In any case, that Engels regarded the exploitation theory as the central
point of the first volume, is clear. In reply to the above-quoted
letter, Marx writes to Engels:

I am completely of your opinion that at first you should not
go more closely into the money theory, but only hint that the matter is
treated in a new way. (4.2.1868)

Marx was thus in agreement with Engels that the money theory was secondary
for the purpose of introducing his work to the public, although he only
puts the word "new", and not the words "very simple" into Engels' mouth.
Marx himself therefore concurs with the introduction of a hiatus between
the value theory and the theory of surplus-value (here including the theory
of absolute and relative surplus-value production). The latter is
obviously viewed by Marx as containing the critical content amenable to
political agitation. The value theory is relegated to a scientific
status, important for superseding other economic theories, but secondary
from the viewpoint of radical politics. The history of marxism has
entrenched this caesura between the first and second Parts of Volume I.
A critical content of the value and money theory has never made itself
felt in the political sphere. Marx himself was not in a position
to clarify the critical import of the connection between the categories
of the value theory and those of the surplus-value theory. The dialectical
figures of the value-form analysis were not regarded by Marx as being essential
for making the critique of capitalist relations implied by the surplus-value
theory lucid. If this had been so, then it would have been folly
to suppress the value theory in even a short article which was to have
had political reverberations. Marx's increasing vulgarisation of
the dialectical aspects of the value theory, and the lack of a dialectical
development of the category of capital out of that of money, have sealed
off the critical content of the Marxian theory for over one hundred years.

Because Engels is taken up with business in the Manchester factory,
he cannot find the time to come to writing down the "Beesly article" (Engels
to Marx 10.4.1868). He has considerable trouble with settling on an appropriate
beginning to the article and again asks Marx's advice in letters of 10
and 22 May. Marx replies on /xxx) 23 May, with a draft of a beginning,
which Engels actually reworks and incorporates into the review. Concerning
the value theory, Marx reiterates his view that it should be skipped, but
distances himself slightly in his choice of words:

In my view, since you want (sic) to begin with Chapter II (Part
II in the second edition ME) (you must not forget however to draw the reader's
attention somewhere to the fact that s/he will find the value- and money-shit
presented in a new way in Chapter I) the following could be used as introduction,
of course in a form suitable to yourself. (Marx to Engels 23.5.68)

Again, here there is only a reference to the newness of the value- and
money-theory, and not to its extreme simplicity. Marx is concerned
only to point out to the reader the newness of his value theory, and not
that it is crucial for his analysis of capitalist production. He
apparently has the attitude that the value theory is the logical prerequisite
of his theory of capitalist production, but is not indispensable for understanding
what this latter theory means, and especially, what the critique is of
capitalist production. The marxist discussion in recent years has
adopted this apparent Marxian attitude (cf. also Marx's advice to Mrs.
Kugelmann) in every way by setting up the problem of whether the Marxian
value theory is necessary for the Marxian theory of class exploitation.
The Neo-Ricardians have revelled in demonstrating that value magnitudes
are redundant in demonstrating that the capitalists expropriate a surplus-product(25).

"From 29 May until about 15 June Marx and his daughter Eleanor stayed
in Manchester with Engels."(MEW17 734 ed. note 127) Marx presumably gave
Engels more tips for the review during his stay (passages to quote, etc.).
In any case, Engels writes to Marx on 22 June with the news that "the article
is coming along famously and will be positively ready this week".
On 28 June: "The article is ready".

The piece was sent to Prof. Beesly, who "sent it to Henry (Marx is mistaken;
he's called John ME) Morley (chief editor of the '-Fortnightly Review')"
(Marx to Engels 23.7.1868). And then a couple of weeks later: /xxxi)

Enclosed letter from J. Morley, the chief editor of the 'Fortnightly'.
Beesly did his best, but Mr. M. found the thing unreadable. Never
mind! (Marx to Engels 10.8.1868)

Engels is understandably upset in his next letter about the "petty-minded
lousy clique-system", etc.(Engels to Marx 12.8.1868) The affair with the
'Fortnightly' closes with a meeting between Marx and Prof. Beesly:

I had a meeting with Beesly. The subeditor of Morley
explained, the development is irreversible. Indeed, the article is
too 'dry' for a magazine. Beesly proposes that I popularise the thing,
without sacrificing the scientific points. This is rather difficult.
However, I will try to. (Marx to Engels 15.10.1868)

In the course of the months, Beesly's attitude changes from "moral certainty"
that a review could be published, to the view that Marx should try to popularise
and not be so dry. Beesly offers an alternative, namely, that the
popularised article should appear in the 'Westminster Review'. It
appears that here too, nothing came of the off-hand offer.

It is clear from this and other stories that Marx had considerable trouble
in finding readers (Samuel Moore was an exception: "The most conscientious
reader of your book here is Sam Moore; he has thoroughly worked through
over 600 pages, and swots on unflaggingly." (Engels to Marx 19.3.1868)
and editors who would take his work seriously. Wilhelm Liebknecht,
for example, was frightfully enthusiastic to propagate Marx's theory, although
Marx was convinced that he had not "read 15 pages of the book". (Marx to
Engels 25.1.1858)

The detailed investigations by Backhaus serve as grounds for initiating
a reconstruction of at least the value theory. And since the value
theory is the conceptual foundation of the entire conceptual structure
of Capital, reconstruction cannot stop short with a new version
of the value theory. The methodological remarks provided in II above
explicitly set out a particular mode of argumentation which unambiguously
marks itself off from any logical-historical methodology. This methodology
has been formulated in a consideration not only of Marx, but also of Hegel
/xxxii) and of modern German constructivism. By taking an explicit
methodological position, the character of dialectics is brought into the
open. An explicit dialectics which emphasises the category of contradiction
in the context of the contents of the analysis, is able to demonstrate
what is implied by critique. This methodology has been applied in
our reconstructed capital-analysis (see Appendix). The starting point
is a new value theory which results from separating a form-analytic strand
of argumentation from a classical labour theory of value of the Ricardian
type. Arguments for this separation of the grain from the chaff cannot
be gone into here (cf. App.). The reconstruction lays particular emphasis
on the fact that the value theory is the foundation of a particular theory
of money, namely, as form of value. This value theory of money is
simultaneously a critique of all pre-monetary value theories. Commodities
and money are to be understood as the form of social synthesis (Vergesellschaftung)
of bourgeois labour. This specific concept of the Vergesellschaftung
of labour enables then an analysis of the capitalist production, circulation
and reproduction processes during which further value-forms, such as wages,
surplus-value, capital, rent, interest, profit, fixed and circulating capital,
arise. The reader will note from the overall structure given in I
above that the order of presentation of the various themes also diverges
from Marx's.

Here I do not give a more detailed explication of salient features of
our reconstructed capital-analysis. I conclude this subsection with
an anticipation of a result won by value-form analytic considerations,
which distinguishes it from common interpretations of Marx's theory.
The inspiration for this divergence can be found in Marx himself, above
all in certain passages in the Grundisse, and also in aspects of
Adorno's interpretation of Marx. In Negative Dialectics Adorno
stresses a characteristic of capitalist relations as "a universal which
realises itself over the heads of the subjects" (Adorno 1966 p.345):

Because the constitutive forms of social synthesis ... maintain
their unconditional supremacy over the humans, as if they were divine destiny.
(ibid. p.347)

In support of this view Adorno quotes the Grundrisse: /xxxiii)

The individuals are subsumed under social production, which
exists outside them as a stroke of fate; but social production is not subsumed
under the individuals, which employs them as its communal asset.(G 76 cited
in ibid. p.327)

This passage occurs in a discussion of money and exchange-value, and cannot
therefore be interpreted as applying only to the labourers who are subsumed
under capital, but to all the individuals caught up in capitalist economy.
This generalisation of those who are the 'prisoners' of capitalist relations
is taken up by Adorno in his later writings, where he refers to the extension
of the power of reified social relations over the capitalists themselves:

Domination over humans is still exercised through the economic
process. Its objects are long since not only the masses but also
those with power of disposal and their appendage. (Adorno 1970 p.155)

This shift of emphasis in the critical import of a social theory signals
the displacement of the theory of surplus-value as a theory of class exploitation
from its central place in the traditional self-understanding of marxism.
The labourers are indeed subsumed under capitalist relations in a characteristic
way which involves the creation of surplus-value. The surplus-value
theory however is reformulated as the theory of a contradiction on the
basis of a form-analytic value theory. The point of the surplus-value
theory is not the scientific proof of class exploitation. The concern
with an exploitation theory in this sense belongs to the tradition of marxism
understood as a science of history of the various class societies, through
to bourgeois society. The next step in the march of history should
abolish this class exploitation once and for all. Some marxists refer
to the surplus-value theory as a theory of the form in which surplus-product
is appropriated under capitalism. This is a bare improvement on a
vulgar Histomat. Surplus-value is indeed the value-form of the surplus-product
appropriated by capital. Some marxists interpret this as a theory
of how class exploitation under capitalism is disguised under the value-form.
This leads back to an understanding of scientific socialism as uncovering
the (hidden) exploitation in capitalism, disguised by the deluding formal
equality of /xxxiv) labourer and capitalist as free persons. The
formal equality of free persons comes somewhat closer to the crux of a
critique of capitalism, but not in connection with the fact that surplus-product
is appropriated. Attention should instead be focused on the relation
between these free persons, namely, the wage-labour relation.

By virtue of the wage-form (of value), the labourer stands under the
domination
of the capitalist in the production process. The latter employs the
former as an object, as far as possible, like a piece of machinery, in
the production of commodities. This NEGATION OF THE LABOURERS'
SUBJECTIVITY is the kernel of the critique of capital. The value-categories
allow the subjugated subjectivity of the labourers to be expressed.
The labourers are subjected to the wage-form - an aspect of the value totality
- and to the capitalist's command in the production process - which he
can exercise only as personification of the value totality. The value
categories articulate that wages and the alien power of capital are nothing
but the alienated form of their own labour. The reified form of their
own labour subsumes them in the production process. The capitalist
is the agent of this subjugation, and simultaneously is himself subsumed
under the value-form, as buyer and seller of commodities. In providing
the categories for the analysis of the negation of subjectivity through
the universal domination of abstract social labour over living labour,
the value-form analysis lays the ground for a negation of the negation.
If subjectivity were to become aware of the extent of its negation through
the abstract universality, this knowledge could lead to a consistent collective
act to overcome this subjugation once and for all.

The theme, negation of subjectivity, cannot be restricted to a critique
of economy. The bourgeois private sphere presents itself as the realm
where subjectivity can flower. Critical thinking can show just how
illusory this flowering of subjectivity is in a society where social labour
exists as reified totality(26).

The fragmentary character of Marx's theory shows itself as having decidedly
political consequences. The critique cannot be made clear without
an analysis which grasps the whole. /xxxv)

4. The Analysis of Competitive Freedom

The object of the competition-analysis is the forms of consciousness and
action of the individuals on the surface of capitalist economy. The
characterisation of this object as surface is already a reference to the
fact that here it is not a matter of an autonomous object which is immediately
accessible to analysis. The capital-analysis constitutes the necessary
systematic prelude to the analysis of competitive freedom. The essential
relations of production, the bourgeois economic categories which are foreign
to everyday consciousness, now assume forms of appearance which mask the
pre-given economic objectivity and which, as forms of action and consciousness,
are near to the familiar conceptions of everyday consciousness. The
imaginary character of these surface relations as independent social forms
should be demonstrated through the construction of an inner connection
with the categories expressing the abstract-universality of the capitalist
mode of production. In particular, the way in which the total movement
of valorization proceeds through the opposed strivings of the subjects
of competition is to be explained.

The competition and capital-analyses are complementary not only from
the side of the former, but also from the side of the capital-analysis.
The latter operates with a reduced concept of subjectivity; the economic
actors appear there merely as the representatives of economic categories,
who fulfil roles which are adequate to and identical with aspects of the
total valorization process of capital. If terms of intentionality
- aims, means, etc., i.e. a terminology of subjectivity - are employed
in the capital-analysis, it must be understood that this is the surrogate
subjectivity of executors of an economic process which asserts itself in
conceptual categories foreign to the conceptions of the subjects of everyday
economic life. For this reason, we refer to the actors in the capital-analysis
as character-masks. On the level of the competition-analysis, by
contrast, forms of subjectivity are thematised which correspond to everyday
notions. Here it is a matter of the pursuit of individual aims with
appropriate means. The means, property, are well-known to everyday
consciousness as is the struggle which results from the implementation
of these /xxxvi) means. The concepts formed of these well-known phenomena
however are alien to everyday consciousness. The concepts of the
competition-analysis reveal the underlying connection existing between
the competitive struggle and the process of the value totality; the freedom
of private property turns out to be based on an inversion (Umkehrung)
of (competition) subject and (value-form) object.

The subjects of competition who appear in the competition-analysis are
not to be identified with subjects per se. The concept of
subjectivity on the level of competition remains restricted to the pursuit
of economic interests. In this sense, the subjects of competition
remain economic character-masks. For the sake of terminological clarity,
however, the term 'character-mask' is employed only for the level of the
capital-analysis. A fuller concept of subjectivity, where for example
human needs and emotions come under conceptual scrutiny, will first be
developed in the analysis of the private sphere. Roughly speaking,
there are four tiers in the articulation of bourgeois subjectivity: character-mask
(capital-analysis), subject of competition, private subject; the participation
of the subject in the life of the (concrete) universal as citizen can be
designated as a fourth broad level of subjectivity (treated in §§100ff).
(Parts IX and X of the whole system are here left to one side.)

The conceptual transition from the capital- to the competition-analysis
is made via the level of the revenue-form analysis, which is presented
in an appropriately modified form in Part I. This is taken as transitionary
level in the present work because the various value-form categories and
character-masks are there summarised. On this level too, a certain
mystification of the process of value-creation has been articulated, which
smooths the way to the increasingly imaginary (in relation to the essential
value-form objectivity) character of the social relations. It would
be a peculiar misconception of the character of systematic thinking to
turn this use of categories which to a certain extent mystify the essence
into an objection against a systematic mode of presentation which takes
forms of appearance of value seriously. In employing revenue-source relations
as transitionary categories, /xxxvii) the systematic thread to deeper-lying
relations is not lost. On the contrary, thereby, the inner thread
is first demonstrated to consciousness. The insistence is
made that the essence does not appear immediately - in which case, a dialectical
theory would be entirely superfluous - but mediated through forms of appearance.
This mediation is performed through successive levels of the analysis.
In the main text, we pass over Part IV of the systematic with only a brief
mention (cf. §10). This has been done for pragmatic reasons
of space, to allow the reader eager to gain a vista of the plains lying
behind the capital-analysis the quickest possible access to this new territory.
The risk with this propadeutical strategy is that the reader COMPLETELY
MISSES THE POINT of the analysis. I make therefore the following
caveat: the reader wishing to fully understand or criticise the present
work has no alternative in the long run but to work his/her way through
the appendix. Since philosophy is a circle, it matters little where
consciousness enters it; but it must be prepared to follow this circle
back to its starting point, if it is to completely unearth its own presuppositions.

Although in his systematic plan, Marx envisaged a treatment of competition
separate from the analysis of capital in general (cf. I above), in the
published first volume of Capital remarks on competition are made
which can only be regarded as systematic anticipations. In the chapter
on the working day, for example, the struggle between the capitalists and
wage-labourers over the length of the working day - a theme which properly
belongs to the competition-analysis - is discussed. In this context,
Marx makes the following statement:

The free competition enforces the immanent laws of capitalist
production vis-à-vis the individual capitalist as external compulsion.(Cl
257; KI 286)

Similar statements can also be found In the treatment of relative surplus-value
production in connection with the introduction of new methods of production
(cf. e.g. CI 371; KI 414). Such assertions, in spite of their ring
of common sense in the ear of everyday consciousness, are necessarily programmatic.
A concept of competitive subjectivity must first be developed before one
can grasp what the compulsions of competition are. Marx nowhere /xxxviii)
clearly poses nor solves this conceptual problem. If one can claim
that dialectical elements are increasingly eliminated in progressive versions
of the value theory, then a much more drastic diagnosis holds for later
portions of Marx's theory: the care with which Marx worked out a concept
of money stands in rude contrast to the conceptually slovenly way in which
certain contents of everyday consciousness are drawn into later levels
of the analysis as self-explanatory obviousnesses. The analysis does
not in the least get behind these obviousnesses to allow consciousness
to gain a critical distance to them. Only the course of the analysis,
the systematic relation of the competition-analysis to the capital-analysis,
is able to elaborate Marx's remarks on the subject of competition in Capital
as statements about the competitive action of a form-determinate subjectivity.

In the same section of the Grundrisse where formulations of the
overhang of social objectivity are to be found, as quoted above in III,
passages can be read which indicate the necessity of complementing the
capital-analysis with an analysis of competitive freedom in order to clarify
how the subjects of competition deal with the overhang of objectivity with
which they are confronted. We quote some Grundrisse passages which
hint at the task to be fulfilled by systematic thinking:

...rather, a universal negation results from this bellum omnium
contra omnes. The point lies rather in the fact that private interest
itself is already a socially determinate interest and can only be achieved
within conditions posited by society; that is, it is bound to the reproduction
of these conditions and means. It is the interest of the private
individual; but its content, as well as form and means of realisation,
is given by social conditions independent of all. The social character
of the activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the portion
which the individual has of production, appears here as something alien
and thing-like, opposed to the individuals; not as the behaviour of their
mutual opposition, but as their subjugation under relations which exist
independently of them and which arise out of the clash of indifferent individuals
with one /xxxix) another. The universal exchange of activities and
products, which has become a condition of life for each single individual,
their mutual connection, appears to them itself alien, independent, as
a thing. Although the whole of this movement appears as social process,
and although the single moments of this movement proceed from the conscious
will and particular purposes of the individuals, the totality of the process
appears nevertheless as an objective connection which arises as a natural
growth; indeed proceeds from the effect on one another of the conscious
individuals but lies neither in their consciousness, nor is it as a whole
subsumed under them. (G74 75, 111)

Marx's discussion of these topics in the chapter on money indicates that
he regards the kernel of this reification of social relations as lying
in the commodity form. The adequate articulation of the confrontation
of individuals with an alien social objectivity however requires the mediation
of many categories which allow such categories as 'private interest', 'means
of realisation of private interest', 'mutual opposition of individuals',
'universal exchange of activities and products' to be brought to an adequate
conceptualisation. The conceptual language on the level of the analysis
of commodities and money, which only initiates the analysis of capitalist
form-objectivity, is too poor for the formulation of the richer, more concrete
categories of the surface of economic life.

Why is the competition-analysis characterised as a critique of competitive
FREEDOM?
With this characterisation, it should not be overlooked that freedom is
only one side of the coin: the other is the economic COMPULSION
of the pre-given value-form objectivity. The analysis of competitive
freedom is simultaneously its critique, in that it demonstrates the conditional
character of the freedom of competition subjects; it consists precisely
in the freedom to compete. The freedom is realised in the pursuit
of the economic interest to earn income with appropriate means, namely,
with various types of property. This freedom is not to be criticised
as illusory, but as merely the obverse side of an indifferent compulsion
of social objectivity. Competitive freedom does not /xl) exhaust
the bourgeois forms of freedom; consideration of other forms is reserved
to later systematic levels.

In terms of bourgeois society's consciousness of itself, freedom constitutes
its principal category. Freedom is also a central concern of classical
bourgeois philosophy. In particular, the concept of freedom is the fundamental
category of Hegel's social theory of modern society in the Philosophy
of Right. The present work provides the basis for an immanent critique
of Hegel, which is outlined in several of the additions to the systematic
paragraphs. This does not exclude that some of Hegel's arguments
express with social validity the logic of the present form of life.
Some Hegelian arguments will thus be found in the main text, mainly in
connection with the analysis of state (cf. V below). The critique
of Hegel, who has written one of the most systematically elaborated theories
of the bourgeois totality, is not a matter of blank negation of his system,
say, on methodologico-epistemological grounds, but rather one of raising
it to a new, higher level(27)
on which the contradictoriness of the totality is thrown into sharper relief.

The marxist tradition has come to regard Hegel as already superseded,
as encapsulated in the all-purpose litmus of the dichotomy, materialism/idealism.
Marx is presupposed to have settled accounts with idealism early in his
philosophical career, thereby discovering, together with Engels, the 'dialectical-materialist'
method, which disposes of Hegelian idealism, and in which historical material
serves as reassuring underpinning. As we have discussed in III above,
a closer scrutiny of Marx's texts reveals an unsureness on Marx's part
in methodological questions. If one begins to doubt whether Marx
had developed a dialectical-materialist method which stands Hegel's idealism
on its feet, then the convenient dichotomy materialism/idealism in the
bag of tricks for disposing of theories loses its credibility. A
sensible borderline between Marx and Hegel cannot be drawn methodologically,
with a reference to materialism and idealism. The two thinkers are
to be distinguished from one another on the level of content of
their theories and in their respective theoretical starting points.
Marx is namely the theorist who explores the "anatomy of /xli) bourgeois
society" from the starting point of the analysis of commodities and money.

The relevance of today providing a critique of competitive freedom is
poignantly highlighted when one casts a glance at the apologists of this
freedom, such as Friedrich von Hayek and Max Weber. Hayek is a modern
defender of the benevolent workings of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', which
purportedly works a miracle which could not be consciously construed.
Form-analysis can elucidate the more crippling sideswipes of this capricious
hand, which is certainly no helping hand for those with no visible means
of support, among others. The influence of Weber in modern social
theory is not to be underestimated. He systematises some of the principal
prejudices regarding the advisability of bourgeois freedom and the impossibility
of achieving anything better historically. The centrality of the
concern with the freedom of the individual in economic life from Hobbes
to the present day is an index for the fact that we are here dealing with
an epochal category. A dialectical concept of competitive freedom
is crucial for a critique of bourgeois consciousness.

The tendency within marxism has been to try to show that bourgeois freedom
is merely an illusion, that the bourgeois ideals of freedom are never realised(28)
and that these ideals are merely a mask for class domination. This
tendency finds it hard to accept that there are institutionally guaranteed
forms of freedom in bourgeois society (not restricted to the sphere of
competition). It further fails to perceive that the mere measuring
of empirical reality up against the ideals of bourgeois society leaves
the ideal uncriticised. In Hegelian language, the reality of bourgeois
society may well not correspond to its concept (which can have disastrous
consequences for some of its members), but its concept cannot be criticised
through this sort of comparison. To be radical, the critique of bourgeois
society must he able to criticise it in its concept, so that consciousness
will take leave of certain deceptive ideals. Thirdly, it is not the
sole task of theoretical critique to reveal the class character of bourgeois
society. This adherence of marxist critique to one aspect of bourgeois
reality has rendered it incapable of grasping /xlii) the whole of the bourgeois
social form. It substitutes one contradiction in bourgeois society
(which has not been adequately characterised, even by Marx himself) for
the whole and, when it does not actually ignore other social contradictions,
proceeds to subsume the bourgeois world under the schematism of its one
critical insight. A variegated dialectical theory would be able to
show how the unfreedom of the bourgeois human is perpetrated and perpetuated
in and through the bourgeois forms of freedom. Such a theory can
open a perspective for consciousness on a conscious, unfetishised form
of social freedom, by breaking "the spell of the totality"(29).

5. The Analysis of the Bourgeois-Democratic State

The object of analysis of Part IV is the state, firstly as unified social
subject standing over against the society of competitive individuals, and
secondly as a subject apparently embodying the will of the people.
The analysis is to investigate the necessary doubling of society into society
and state (so concretising remarks of the young Marx) and the equally necessary
attempt at reconciling this doubling through the constitution of a democratic
identity. The guiding thread for this part of the analysis too is
the concept of bourgeois freedom, but now not restricted to competitive
freedom. New forms of freedom and compulsion arise in connection
with the mighty subject, the state. The analysis will be an investigation
of why bourgeois freedom is inextricably bound to means of physical repression
and force. Both the doubling and the intimate bonds between freedom
and force are forms of appearance of the sundered moments of particularity
and (abstract) universality inaugurated in the value-form. This claim
can only be substantiated by the whole of the analysis. The form-analysis
of state presented in the main text has scarcely any resemblance with marxist
theories of state. The further one moves from the beginnings of the
analysis in the value theory, the greater the difference between marxist
thinking and a dialectical form-analysis.

The marxist theory of State is in a parlous, even scandalous, condition.
Scarcely any progress has been made in the entire marxist discussion towards
winning a well,-grounded concept of state. /xliii) It has been a matter
of elaborating on the notions about the state as set down already in the
works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Gramsci. In attempting to construct
a critical theory of state from classical sources, the scientificity of
the theory has been surrendered. A theory of state must be able to
stand on its own feet in order to present an argumentation which would
have to be accepted as inter-subjectively binding and not merely insightful
for the marxist who, in any case, mostly proceeds from certain unquestioned
postulates. The construction of a state theory cannot be compared
with the task of reconstruction of the capital-analysis (cf. III above).
As we have seen above (I), Marx's plan for a system comprising a theory
of state remained unexecuted. There exist no elaborated systematic
writings of Marx which could be sensibly taken as the raw material of efforts
at reconstruction. The writings of the early Marx on state have either
polemical character, e.g. against Hegel (from a radical-democratic standpoint),
or are programmatic in the sense that notions of the alienation of the
state from society require for their adequate conceptualisation the analysis
of economic categories, to which Marx turned only later, with his critique
of political economy. In this programmatic sense, the mature Marx
fell far behind the young Marx. As early as 1844, in the preface
to the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx announces an even
more ambitious project than that planned at the time of writing of the
Grundrisse.
Decidedly non-economic themes are named:

I will therefore publish successively in different independent
brochures the critique of right, morality, politics, etc. and in conclusion
try to give the connection of the whole, the relation of the individual
parts as well as finally, the critique of the speculative treatment of
this material. For this reason, in the present work one finds the
connection of national economy with state, right, morality. bourgeois life,
etc. only mentioned insofar as national economy itself mentions these objects
ex professo.(Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte Leipzig
1970 p.87 MEW Erg. Bd. p.467)

On the other hand, the mature Marx carries out an elaborate realisation
of at least the first part of a program whose argument- /xliv) ation is
well-explicated and grounded compared to the early works.

Marx's political and historical writings cannot be regarded as having
independent scientific value. They contain certain views of Marx
on the state, such as its class nature, which first have to be. grounded
by a conceptual argumentation, if at all. The Communist Manifesto
(written together with Engels), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
and the Civil War in France possess interest as historical works
or in connection with Marx's views on socialist society. In Part
IV therefore, we will not discuss these texts.

The roots of the classical marxist theory of state can be found in Engels
rather than with Marx. Engels' book The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State must be regarded as the foundation text
for all further marxist views on the state. This work, quickly thrown
together in the space of two months, during which Engels had visits from
friends (Roth 1982 p.145 n.16), suffers from being based on a (mytho)logical-historical
mode of presentation rather than a dialectical theory. Historically
questionable descriptions stand in for concepts. I was able to learn
nothing from this text in my research.

The third influential classical source of the marxist theory of state
is Lenin's State and Revolution and related texts. We are
confronted with a text which merely re-mouths Marx's and Engels' views
on state and which therefore forfeits interest from a scientific perspective.
Lenin's polemical aim in writing State and Revolution was to beat
the revisionists Kautsky et al over the head with quotations from Marx
and Engels. Faithfulness to the masters is the yardstick of his critique,
not insightful argumentation which could be assessed independently by the
reader. The legacy of this incestuous mode of theory formation is
the strikingly unsystematic character of the classical marxist texts on
state, which goes hand in hand with the adherence to certain dogmatically
held - because conceptually ungrounded - ideas about the state. The
most important of these is the class nature of the bourgeois state.
Even Gramsci, whose genuine innovations in thinking on the state (although,
systematically speaking, chaotic) /xlv) cannot be gone into here, does
not problematise the axiomatic character of the class state. For
any systematically argued critical theory of the bourgeois state (we are
not interested in developing a general, transepochal notion of state),
the dispute around the marxist notion of class state must assume a central
position. Quotations from Marx supporting this view cannot decide
the dispute one way or the other. The question is not whether the
bourgeois state is a sphere of a form of society in which there are social
classes. (Although it is to be noted that the common understanding of social
classes constitutes a point of contention in the present work.) The question
to be settled by form-analysis is whether the bourgeois state is to be
conceptualised as class-state, in the sense of an agency of the ruling
classes (Ausschuß der herrschenden Klassen). To satisfy
the reader's curiosity, it can be said that this latter notion of the state
is discarded by form-analysis as a piece of pure dogma useless to anyone
trying to give a convincing account of the social form, state. The
reader interested in what form-analysis positively has to offer for a critique
of the state is referred to Part IV. We mention only that we do not
serve up the old marxist (not necessarily Marx's).soup one more time, and
provide arguments instead which can counter other (bourgeois) conceptions
of the state by showing the grain of truth within them, but not at the
cost of sacrificing the critique of value-form categories. On the
contrary, a successful critique must be able to enter into a dialogue with
other views on the state, and thereby dissolve them in the systematic argumentation.
The senselessness of the confrontation between marxist and bourgeois theories
of state, at least on the marxist side, can be seen in the failure of the
marxists to self-critically reflect whether, or in which sense, the notion
'class state' can be made a grounded critical category.

The conception of state as an instrument of class domination is presented
nowhere-more unequivocally than with Lenin. Despite all the critique
of Leninism in its political form, a reassessment of his views on state
has not led to any advance on the conceptualisation of state in the marxist
discussion. Like Engels, and Marx in his popularising Histomat variant,
Lenin poses the /xlvi) problem of state historically rather than conceptually:

The most important thing if one is to approach this question
scientifically is not to forget the underlying historical connection, to
examine every question from the standpoint of how the given phenomenon
arose in history and what were the principal stages of its development,
to examine what it has become today. (Lenin, 'The State' SW3 261)

This methodology is firmly in the tradition of the logical-historical mode
of argumentation, which, in the end, simply replaces conceptual problems
with historical questions as to origins, sequences and correlations.
In the hands of Lenin, this historical approach leads to bone-crunching,
overbearing orthodoxy where theory is treated as the distillation of a
quintessence extracted from historical material:

Engels' book The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State... is one of the fundamental works of modern socialism,
every sentence of which can be accepted with confidence, in the assurance
(!) that it has not been said at random (cf. p.xliv above ME) but is based
on immense historical and political material.(ibid.)

This is nothing other than an invitation to scientific paternalism, an
attitude amenable to moulding marxism into a state religion. No wonder
then that the average Soviet citizen has a stomachful of Marx, and those
intellectual refugees from the East who still find something useful in
Marx are deeply imbued with a Histomat2 conception.

The historical mode of argumentation is to assert that where class society
has existed, the state has also existed, from which the conclusion can
be drawn,
voilà:

The state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another,
a machine for holding in obedience to one class other, subordinated classes.
(ibid. p.267)

Does this conception capture the character of state? Is anyone to
be critically enlightened in the long run by such statements without ossifying
into dogmatism? Is the conception of state as "an apparatus of physical
coercion, an apparatus of violence" (ibid. p.265) adequate? It presupposes
that the instrument of domination /xlvii) is met by the active resistance
of the dominated class. Otherwise, the physical coercion and violence
would be only latent. Where the exploited class does not organise
its political resistance to the state itself, or to the dominant classes,
as in the present period in all bourgeois countries, the Leninist conception
of state has an empty ring of revolutionary fervour appealing only to Trotskyist
sects. Lenin's notion of state derives basically from revolutionary
periods, from which we today are far removed. (Which raises the question
for a critic of bourgeois society: Was Tun?) The one-sided notion
of class domination precludes Lenin from taking bourgeois freedom and equality
at all seriously: "all citizens supposedly become equal" (ibid. p.269)
in the bourgeois epoch, "all were regarded as equal before the law irrespective
of what capital each owned" (ibid.). The labourer is treated as "a
poor man who own(s) nothing but his labour-power" (ibid.) and at the same
time as "possessing no property" (ibid.), as "propertyless workers" (ibid.
p.270). This inconsistency in formulation of the property status of the
labourer, an inconsistency running through the entire marxist literature
(cf.e.g. §74Aa-e), indicates a deeper-lying misconception of the critique
of capitalism. Lenin's emphasis on the propertylessness of the labourers
in capitalism allows him to criticise the 'illusion' of equality under
the system of private property. The underlying inequality expresses
itself, as Lenin emphasises in ever new variants, in "a situation in which
some gorge while others starve" (ibid. p.274). The critique of capitalism
is thus a critique of the gap between rich and poor. Since this injustice
should be obvious even to naive bourgeois consciousness, the task of socialist
politics is not so much predicated on a conceptual understanding of the
reality which is to be changed, but on political organisation around slogans
about class oppression and inequality in material wealth and economic power.
Those who point out the real (abstract) formal equality of bourgeois individuals
as property-owners and the freedom to compete with this private property,
can only be answered with a demand for 'concrete' equality and the accusation
that they are class enemies of the proletariat. End of the discussion,
the revolutionary class struggle begins. No further clarity is striven
for about the category of the labourers' freedom of private /xlviii) property
in their own bodies. In denying that in the bourgeois epoch the labourers
have certain forms of universally valid freedom, the crude view of the
state as "a machine for the suppression of some people by others" (ibid.
p.273) lies to hand. All other accounts of the state have to be discarded
as lies and insidious obfuscations which mask the interests of the capitalist
and land-owning classes. Lenin is only able to write a dogmatic view
of the state which denies a validity to views which take the existing forms
of bourgeois freedom seriously, and, in spite of this, SUBJECT THEM
TO CRITIQUE. Lenin's critique avoids debate on the very issues which
would allow him a real contestation with his bourgeois revisionist opponents.
The problems which Lenin perceives are political rather than theoretical
in nature, of the political propagation of correct and easily understood
historical ideas. The question of state is posed by him in a simple
either/or manner:

Is the state in a capitalist country, in a democratic republic
... an expression of the popular will, the sum total of the general decision
of the people, the expression of the national will, and so forth; or is
the state a machine that enables the capitalists of those countries to
maintain their power over the working class and the peasantry? (ibid. p.270)

The author who exaggeratedly emphasises the absolute necessity of studying
the "WHOLE of Hegel's LOGIC" to understand anything of Capital,
expresses himself here in a somewhat less than dialectical manner.
With this either/or logic, a real problematising of a concept of state
is foreclosed once and for all. One can be either a defender of the
bourgeoisie or a champion of the proletariat. The critique of the
bourgeois state is already encapsulated in its asserted class nature.
The tenacity with which marxism has clung to this view of state, which
can say nothing worth mentioning about the contradictoriness of the bourgeois
forms of freedom, lies at the core of the impasse at which modern marxism
finds itself. Instead of posing the problem of a critique of state,
marxism has taken the easy way out, and fled into the empirical social
sciences.

An awakening of interest in a theory of the bourgeois superstructure
/xlix) based upon a systematically conceived capital-analysis blossomed
briefly in the first half of the seventies in the West German Staatsableitung
debate. Only relatively late in the piece did English-speaking marxism
come to read about this debate with the publication of a collection of
papers in Holloway and Picciotto (eds.) State and Capital: A Marxist
Debate (London 1978). In the following pages, the editors' introduction
will be discussed in order to show how a German development in theory,
which offered at least the prospect of a serious rethinking and consolidation
of Marx's theory, has been entirely misused and misinterpreted in the context
of British marxism(30), by selecting
only those (brashly orthodox) elements of the debate which can affirm entrenched
prejudices. With phrases such as the "limits of the logical 'state
derivation' approach" (Holloway & Picciotto 1978 p.25), the fact is
masked that the German debate came to no successful execution of even the
"first step" of its original task, formulated by Holloway and Picciotto
as:

to 'derive' the state as a political form from the nature of
the capitalist relations of production, as a first step towards constructing
a materialist theory of the bourgeois state and its development. (ibid.
p.2)

Even this formulation, which makes a concession to a systematic problematic,
treats the "derivation" as an irksome prelude to the real task of a "developmental"
theory. With the ebbing of the student movement, the rollback against
marxists in German universities, and the West German left's farewell to
Marx, the occupation with capital-analytic theory has become more and more
of a curiosity (from the perspective of 1984). The worsening of political
conditions reinforced and furthered an inner tendency of the debate to
capitulate and dissolve into empirical and historical studies. This
does not prevent this dissolution being presented in a thoroughly positive
light not only by British and American marxists, but also by West German
leftists(31).

To return to our authors: the scare quotes around 'derive' in the above
quoted passage already indicate that Holloway and Picciotto are sceptical
about derivation. They make several apologies to the reader with
the effect that his/her anglo-saxon wariness about /l) a project of systematic
derivation is left unshaken, so that in the end form-analysis becomes a
vague and empty phrase signifying a development in theory whose assimilation
and truncation by traditional marxism should pose no insurmountable difficulties.
The West German debate never reached any clarity over what 'derivation'
means, and thus drew on notions of formal-logical deduction on the one
hand, and of causality on the other. Neither notion offers much at
all for the aim of a critique, and it is no wonder that West German marxists
quickly came to the apparent limits of the derivation debate. A logical
deduction exhausts itself with analytic conclusions drawn from a prioristic
axioms, not exactly the thing to set a critical spirit on fire. The
search for causal relations, in the time-honoured manner of the social
sciences, seeps very quickly into historical and empirical research.
The project of a dialectical theory of the superstructure seems to vaporize
before the eyes. The derivationists themselves never came across
the idea of critique as phenomenological form-analysis. There thus
exist some grounds on which Holloway and Picciotto can be excused for their
wooden, sclerotic representation of derivation, especially when one considers
that their contact with the German debate was mediated by Joachim Hirsch.

Their summary of the debate opens with the acquiescing phrase: "Since
the 'state derivation' debate often appears to be so abstract..." (ibid.
p.15) and concludes with the calming reassurance: "If the reader finds
the debate at times too formal and abstract, these criticisms (Wer denkt
abstrakt? ME) are partly justified. (ibid. p.30) With such remarks,
the authors guarantee that the distaste for conceptual thinking will only
be reinforced. The three contributors to the book who represent the
dissolution and provisional failure of the derivation debate (Hirsch, Gerstenberger,
Braunmühl) are presented as its saviours in that they "raise in different
forms the question of the limits of the form-analysis of the state." (ibid.
p.29)(32)

Why it is that a derivation of state should only be a "first step" (ibid.
p.2) in the construction of a materialist theory of the state, is revealed
by the authors' idea that an adequate theory /li) must be able to account
for the historical development of the bourgeois state. They criticise
Blanke, Juergens and Kastendiek for making a "rigid distinction between
form analysis and historical analysis."(ibid. p.21) "...the actual history
of the development of state functions and state institutions is therefore
something which has somehow to be added after the logical derivation has
been completed ... " (ibid. p.26) "... it is hard to see how an adequate
form analysis can be anything other than historical." (ibid. p.27) Here
we have it: the derivation, conceived as a form-analysis, collapses into
history, because any alternative is "hard to see". Over a hundred
years of marxism is a support for this statement.

Backhaus' pioneering work, which aims at a radical shake-up of marxism,
should have made Holloway and Picciotto a little circumspect in methodological
and reconstructive questions concerning Marx's writings. They cite
Backhaus' early article (ibid. p.179), without showing any evidence whatever
of having learnt anything from him. They refer unproblematically
to Marx's "derivation of the money form from the contradictions of the
commodity" (ibid. p.16), although it is precisely this derivation which
has been problematised by Backhaus(33).
The conception of a "derivation" from "contradictions of the commodity"
only makes sense as a logical transition. In the light of the critical
German literature on the subject, which is accessible to the authors, the
naivety with which they regurgitate Engels' vulgar view on method is nothing
less than astounding. Even the famous methodological remarks by Marx
in the introduction to the Grundrisse, which at least partially
contradict the Engelsian conception, are not cited.

Holloway and Picciotto conceal the fragmentary character of Marx's
Capital
when they insist that

the task is not to develop 'political concepts' to complement
the set of 'economic concepts' but to develop the concepts of Capital
in the critique not only of the economic but also of the political form
of social relations. (ibid. p.4)

The conceptual structure, according to the authors, is already complete
and requires merely an extension of application of the categories of Capital
to the "political form of social relations". /lii) Whereas Poulantzas produces
notions to grasp the specificity of the political, but without providing
any mediation with a capital-analysis (cf. §74Aa), HolIoway and Picciotto
bend the stick entirely the other way in proposing that the capital-analysis
already contains the categories necessary

to illuminate the structure of class conflict in capitalist
society and the form and conceptions (economic and otherwise) generated
by that structure. (ibid.)

With respect to systematic analysis, the authors' view is that not only
is the Marxian capital-analysis in no need of reconstruction but
also that no autonomous systematic extension is required to grasp the superstructure.
If this were so, one could only be dumbfounded as to what the objective
of the state derivation debate ever was. The authors claim that this
debate has viewed

the categories elaborated in Capital (surplus value,
accumulation. etc.) ... not as being specific to the analysis of the 'economic
level'. (ibid.)

From such a reductionist standpoint, nothing more than reduction could
be achieved, a grotesque subsumption of superstructural categories under
economic categories which could only reinforce the worst suspicions gladly
set abroad by anti-marxists about marxism's economism. By treating
Hirsch's contribution to the debate most kindly, the authors concur with
the former's economism, expressed in banning the consideration of the state
as an object requiring its own concept and which therefore cannot be grasped
in terms of economic categories(34).
This is apparent in that the authors repeatedly encapsulate their view
of form-analysis as a demonstration of "the relation between the state
and the contradictions of capitalist accumulation" (ibid. p.6). That the
problem of a form-analytic concept of state is not comprehended (the solution
of a problem is often simultaneous with its posing) in the headlong rush
to a theory of development is indicated by the slide from mention of the"state
form" (ibid.) to the "changing forms of state" (ibid. p.7). The dialectical-speculative
task of developing a concept of the bourgeois state is substituted by the
historiographical task of accounting for different historically defined
forms of state. The concept of 'form' in the singular and plural
usage of the word have two entirely different, unrelated meanings. /liii)
The latter has little relevance in a dialectical critique, and that restricted
exclusively to historical illustrations employed to elucidate conceptual
categories. Despite the approving reference to the German debate's
form considerations as a way out of the "rather infertile rut of' the Miliband-Poulantzas
debate" (ibid. p.3), the criticisms made of Miliband, Poulantzas and Gramsci
owe nothing to form-analytic considerations (in the sense outlined in Ill
above) but rather to Holloway and Picciotto's opinion of how an adequate
theory of state should look:

first, they are unable to analyse the development of
political forms (note the plural ME); secondly they are unable to analyse
systematically the limitations imposed on the state by the relation of
the state to the process of capital accumulation. (ibid. p.10)

The first criterion is historical; the second concerns the economic functions
of state, not its form. The authors' incomprehension of the program
of form-analysis as a dialectical theory (it is to be noted that Backhaus'
early article was decisive in opening the derivation debate) is understandable
on the background of their conception of the relation between capitalist
economy and state as one of causality and functionality, rather than as
a dialectical Reflexionsbestimmung arrived at through the consideration
of a contradiction. In II and Ill above we have hinted at characteristics
of a dialectical form-analysis which must seem strange to Anglo-Saxon eyes.
One can be sure that such hints hit a nerve centre which provokes a sharp
unreflected Pavlovian response; the search however is rather for the Archimedian
point. Holloway and Picciotto only managed to find a suitable dust
bin for the derivation debate by referring euphemistically to the evaporation
of form-analysis as: "the limitations of form-analysis have become clear."
(ibid. p.30)

***

Having come this far, the reader is posed with the decision as to whether
to proceed to the heavier-going stuff of a conceptual development. I have
put in some rasping jokes and mischievous, ironical remarks to ease the
way. No compromise has been made with the temptation to popularise
by vulgarising the conceptual development. /liv) A century of marxism has
shown that nothing is to be gained by way of popularisation, when the point
of the critique becomes thereby irretrievably lost. It would be comforting
to delude oneself that in the hurly-burly of politics the finer points
of theory do not make much difference. Alternatively, one could throw
one's hands into the air and exclaim: "If the masses are expected to plough
their way through these dialectics, then we may as well give up now!" That
however would be to put the cart before the horse; in the first place,
it is only the present reader who is posed with this decision. It
would be appropriate to pose the question of what to do with a dialectical
knowledge only AFTER it has been won. If the presentation
has been at all successful, the world should look a little different then.
The reader will have to be prepared to grapple with some reconstructed
Hegelian categories (which presupposes that the reader hold his/her anti-Hegelian
prejudices provisionally in abeyance). The Hegelian categories are
not to be bandied around like advertising slogans (as happened with Althusserian
terminology in the seventies). No apology is made for the demand
that the concepts be thought through according to the rules of the systematic
dialogue. It has become a customary obeisance in English-speaking
marxism to at first embarrass oneself when presenting "abstract theory".
Hegel's question, "Who thinks abstractly?", if pursued, would lead to the
paradoxical result that those who pride themselves on being intimately
in contact with the empirical-concrete are in fact the most abstract thinkers
in the worst sense of the word. This kind of paradox is familiar
to dialectical thinking under the concept 'inversion' (Umkehrung).
For the reader whose curiosity I have succeeded in awakening, I promise
some dialectical surprises.

6. Table of Contents 1984 edition

PREFACE

Preliminaries
I The Marxian System Fragment, its Reconstruction and Extension v
II General Methodological Remarks xiv
III Value-form Analytic Reconstruction of the Capital-Analysis xxiii
IV The Analysis of Competitive Freedom xxxv
V The Analysis of the Bourgeois-Democratic State xlii

PART IV

THE DOUBLING OF COMPETITIVE SOCIETY INTO CIVIL SOCIETY AND STATE 222

§71 Competitive Society 222
§72 The Will to be Acknowledged as Person 222
A Hegel 224
§73 Wrong 225
Aa Hegel 226
Ab 227
§74 The First Determination of the (Outer) State 228
Aa 229
Ab 231
Ac 241
Ad 244
Ae 246
§75 Law 252
Aa Marx 253
Ab Hegel 254
Ac 255
Ad 256
§76 The Doubling of Competitive Society into Civil Society and
State 258
Aa 259
Ab 260
§77 State as Repressive Apparatus based on Rule of Law 263
Aa 265
Ab 266
Ac 267
§78 The Rule of Law,and the Process of Valorization 268
A Hegel 268
§79 The Successful and the Unsuccessful 270
A 271
§80 Income as Universal Means of Existence, The Consumer 271
§81 The Positive Right to Existence 273
A 274
§82 The Welfare State 275
Aa 276
Ab Hegel 277
Ac 279
§83 Taxation and the Autonomous Material Existence of the State
279
A 280
§84 State Economic Policy. The Positing of Universal Well-Being
281
Aa 283
Ab 284
§85 State Monetary Policy 285
Aa 287
Ab 288
§86 State Subsidies and State Enterprises 288
A 289
§87 State as Promoter of Capital Accumulation 290
A 292
§88 State as Promoter of Science and Education 292
A 293
§89 State Intervention in Industrial Strife 294
§90 State Sovereignty, National Interest, Foreign Politics 296
Aa 298
Ab Hegel 298
Ac 299
§91 International Competition and Foreign Investment 301
A 302
§92 Imperialism: First World and Third World 304
A 308
§93 International Competition and Ecological Destruction 308
A 309
§94 Execution of the Universal Will of State: The Bureaucracy
310
§95 Corruption of State Officials 311
§96 Assured Income and Career Path of State Officials 311
§97 Recapitulation: The State's Attempt to Reconcile Universality
with Particularity 312
§98 The Doubled Doubling: Private Universality 313
§99 Subjugation of Civil Society and Private Life to the State
314
§100 Pressure of Coalitions on the Outer State 315
§101 The Gulf between State and Society 316
§102 Bridging the Gulf: the Inner or Bourgeois-Democratic State
317
Aa 317
Ab Hegel 318
Ac 318
§103 State Will as Will of the People. The Citizen 319
§104 Election of Members of Civil Society to the Universal 320
A 321
§105 Parliament: The Legislative Arm of the State 322
A 324
§106 Public Discussion and Parliamentary Proceedings 324
A 324
§107 Government and Ministers. Deliberation and Action 325
A 326
§108 Political Parties, the Opposition, Professional Politics
326
A 328
§109 The Compromise of Class Forces and the Government 329
§110 Disinterest and Apathy: the Apolitical Citizen 330
§111 Political Public Life. The Media 330
§112 Freedom of the Press. Expression of Political Opinion 332
§113 Competition between Political Opinions in Parliament 334
A 335
§114 Political Bribes and Scandals. Legitimacy Crisis 336
§115 The Free West and the Unfree East 337
A 339
§116 Statesmen and the Citizen's Opinion in Foreign Politics 339
Aa 340
Ab 341
§117 Protection of Civil Society from State Power 341
A 342
§118 Separation of Powers. Independence of Judges 343
§119 The Constitution. The Upper and Lower House 344
A 346
§120 The Constitutional Court 346
§121 Referenda. The Citizen's Affirmation of the Diremption
of Universality from Particularity 347
Aa 348
Ab 349

THE REPRODUCTION PROCESS OF CAPITAL 469

§57 Reproduction of the Aggregate Social Capital 469
A 470
§58 Departments of Commodity Production 472
A 472
§59 Distinctions Among Labourers and Lahdholders; Distribution
of
the Total Commodity Product via the Mediation of Money
A 474
/492)
§60 Reproduction of lndividual Capitals 476
A 477
§61 Value Relations between Sectors of the Total System of Reproduction
479
Aa 480
Ab 480
Ac 481
§62 Social Reproduction of Fixed Capital 481
A 483
§63 Accumulation and Expanded Reproduction 484
A 486
§64 Reproduction of the Value-Forms, of the Capital-Relation
and of Class Relations 486
Aa 487
Ab 487

6.2 Abbreviations

The following abbrevations with an adjoining page number are used for the
works listed below. References in the text of the form §_A resp.
App.§_ refer to the additions to the numbered paragraphs resp. to
the Appendix. Note that all translations from the German are my own,
and may therefore not correspond to extant English translations.

Cf. Rosdolsky's discussion of Marx's plan and its changes
in Rosdolsky 1977 pp.10-56. The seven variants of this plan are given in
overview in Wygodski 1967 pp.114-117. Back

Cf. I. Glaser 1982 where a radical thesis for the fragmentary
character of Capital is presented and defended.
Back

The difficulties lying in the way of producing a publishable
version of Marx's capital-analysis which can in any way be regarded as
a finished product are in fact insurmountable. The incompleteness
of the manuscripts - above all the manuscript to Volume 3 written 1864-65
- is attested to by a letter from Marx to Engels written at the time he
was preparing the manuscript for Volume 1 for publication: "Although ready,
the manuscript, enormous in its present form, is uneditable by anyone except
myself, not even by you." (B130 13.2.1866) As it turned out, Engels became,
in spite of this caveat, Marx's editor.Back

One could question whether such a subject matter is subsumable
under a theory described by Marx as "the system of bourgeois economy" (MEW
13 p.7). Regardless of this problem of interpretation, it is clear that
the famous sentences about social being determining consciousness remain
empty and unsubstantiated without the theory which conceptualises what
"social being" and consciousness in the bourgeois form of society are.
The critics of the hitherto most influential attempt to formalise these
contentless unsubstantiated statements, Althusserian marxism, correctly
point to the meaninglessness of phrases such as "determination in the last
instance" and relative autonomy". Back

A daring attempt at an alternative to Marx's theory is
made by Albert & Hahnel (1978), intellectual offspring of the American
New Left. One can wish the adventurous will to break out of the straight-jacket
of orthodox marxism well, as well as the perspective which criticises economism,
"which dissects one aspect of society isolating it from the totality" (A&R
1978 p.130). The positive result however is disappointing.
The alternative "political economy of praxis" starts from a formal model
in which absolutely everything is crammed in by being assigned a variable
within a matrix (ibid. pp.132ff). The attribution of labels to phenomena
is a taxonomic activity useful to stamp collectors and orderly housepersons,
but falls short of anything which could be called theoretical systematicity.
Back

Another version of these sections has appeared in Roth
et al. La Forrna-Valore, and is to appear in German under the title
Die
gedoppelte Verdopplung.Back

The discussion of capital-analysis in West Germany has
been lively and thoroughgoing. We mention here the works of Backhaus,
Krause, Nanninga, Steinvorth, Göhler, Roth, Glaser, Rünzi, Reichelt,
Projektgruppe Entwicklung des Marxschen Systems and Hartmann. Back

One can take any of the Soviet textbooks on political
economy or the work of an orthodox marxist economist such as Mandel.
Other marxist theorists in non-economic areas of theory, such as Poulantzas
and Gramsci, have ignored the theoretical problems in the critique of political
economy. Still other vast areas of modern marxism have no connection
whatever with capital-analytic categories (notwithstanding that they talk
sometimes of labourers, labour-power, capital, etc.). Back

My debt to Backhaus will be obvious to readers of German.
To date only the first of Backhaus' articles, from 1969 (written in 1965!
Cf. the list of Backhaus' work in the bibliography), has appeared in English
translation. Back

Interestingly enough, in an interview shortly before the
appearance of his two-volume work Theorle des Kommunikativen Handelns
in December 1981, Habermas refers expressly to Sweezy's book as having
influenced him at the end of the fifties (in Kommunikation und Ästhetik
No.
45 1981). Back

Cf. LII 249: "With regard to the refutation of a philosophical
system ... the queer notion is to be dispelled, that the system should
be presented as thoroughly false and as if the true system were only to
be counterposed to the false system." Hegel is not arguing here
for pluralism, but for the overcoming of a theory by reaching a higher
standpoint from which the theory criticised is seen to be a "necessary
standpoint" (ibid.). Back

An aspect of Marx's critique of Proudhon can be seen in
Proudhon's demand to simply realise existing bourgeois ideals. Schrader
(1980) writes:

"Instead of from the beginning positing ideal forms of the bourgeois
society against their bad reality and wanting to reaIise them for the first
time or once again, Proudhon, according to Marx, should have posed the
question, why must products take on the form of exchange-values and humans
the form of free and equal rightful persons at all." (p.171)
Marx treats the forms of equality and freedom prematurely, at the level
of the simple circulation of commodities in the Grundrisse and following
texts on the critique of political economy; cf. §§14A, 21. Back

The situation is no better in the United States.
In a review of Holloway and Picciotto's book, Fay (1978) confirms first
of all that the American reception of the debate forecloses any serious
appreciation of conceptual development:

"One reason why the Anglo-American world has always found it
hard to get excited about the state-derivation debate is the high level
of abstraction at which the debate has been conducted." (Fay 1978 p.138)
Because of the common assumption of not only British and American
audiences but also of the participants in the state derivation debate itself,
namely to develop a conceptual apparatus adequate to carry out urgently-needed
(who sets the deadline?) empirical research into concrete historical situations
(ibid. p.140, my quip), the elements of the debate which are concerned
with "abstract concepts and logical derivations" (ibid. p.130) are presented
as a
"failing (which ME) lies in the amount of debate that has been
devoted to the issue of precisely which concept is the valid point of departure."
(ibid.)
Conceptual thinking gets short shrift. Marxist common-sense
accepts unquestioningly that theory is a tool for empirical research, just
at in the social sciences. It would be amusing to see someone try to employ
the Grundrisse as a 'theoretical framework' for "empirical research",
like hanging a wet dog out to dry on a clothesline. The reader of
Marx's main work is invited to stretch his/her imagination:
"Certainly Marx never intended (to which letter is she referring?
ME) Capital to be read as a purely economic analysis (Marx talks of a "critique
of economic categories" ME), but rather as a total analysis of capitalist
society." (ibid. p.131)
The project of developing a concept of state is (from the start,
on the basis of bloody-minded preconceptions) pronounced a still-birth
in the Anglo-American context:
"The rigorously logical derivation of the bourgeois state from
'capital' at its most abstract level will have to be dropped." (ibid. p.149)
The Germans do indeed have a reputation for being dry and stodgy, and
some contributions to the debate in Germany do treat the derivation problem
in a formal-logical way. The reader not hampered with blinkers however
could discover some more fruitful elements in the debate. The source-texts
to the debate by Backhaus, Krahl and Reichelt have never received any attention
in the Anglophone world.
Back

This approval of the dissolution of the derivation
debate does not prevent Boris Frankel from including Holloway and Picciotto
in his list of the "new generation of derivative theorists"(Frankel 1982
p.115). Frankel sees no differences between the various contributions to
Holloway and Picciotto's volume, and caricatures them all as derivations
"from an analysis of the capital accumulation process" (p.116). He shows
interest in the question:

"Can one derive an explanation of the widespread oppression of
women and blacks which has been present in the very structure and practice
of all capitalist and pre-capitalist state apparatuses?!" (ibid.)
As far as I know, no 'derivationist' ever had such Napoleonic
delusions of grandeur. The author probably developed an aversion
to logic in his maths classes in school days. In spite of the new
orthodoxy which quickly precipitated in the West German debate, which Frankel
refers to, it was not such a bad thing that they "rediscovered the three
volumes of Capital" (ibid.). Frankel laments that a ' general
analysis, such as capital cannot provide a "political strategy" (ibid.
p.118) and echoes the oft-heard anguished cry for historical specificity.
According to the author, a good marxist should support "womens' groups,
ecologists, the anti-nuclear movement, numerous nationalist movements such
as the Basques, discriminated minorities and races" (ibid.117) He regrets
only that these movements
"have generally been supported by Marxists only after they became
mass movements - simply because their existence couldn't be 'derived' from
capital when they were silent or non-existent problems." (ibid.)
Frankel can be thankful; at least after these movements have
arisen the Marxist is so busy in solidarity groups that he/she can do nothing
but give up the bad habit of trying to derive nuclear reactors and suchlike
from Capital. Frankel shows himself to be a well-versed dialectician:
"A totality is made up of the dialectical relations between the
general and the particular." (ibid. p.118)
Because however, generally speaking, marxists are so general,
preferring to be Generals (rather than particulars), they
"have tended to ignore the particular, the specific; and to derive
the particular from the general." (ibid.)
Frankel omits that marxists also tend to twist their opponents
words in employing unfair polemical tactics. He gets reinforcement
from a Sydney colleague, who very well could have just finished speaking
long distance with Frankel, when he writes:
"What is required in Marxist scholarship is more concrete empirical
work." (E. Jones 1983 p.30)
Ugh! More drudgery! I s'pose it keeps someone employed.
This acquaintance with the concrete-empirical should
"bring the overly-abstract and fragmented theoretical constructions
down to earth, and in the process ground the theoretical process in concrete
historical detail. Marxists need more exposure to the fine detail
of history, both past and present. ... My view is that, in the context
of contrary values within the academic community (How right you are, Professor!
ME), the position has to be constantly reasserted." (ibid.)
Jones will find no lack of academic colleagues who are willing to reassert
again and again the central tenet of marxist, or more generally, Anglo-Saxon
empiricist common sense. Anyone who doesn't hold it is obviously
off his/her rockers. Evan Jones would in all probability be deeply
disappointed by the present work. Back

Backhaus' first article already casts doubt on the success
of Marx's form-analysis. More detailed discussions of the same problems,
among other things, are contained in the Materialien. On the
problem of the relation between historical and logical moments see especially
'Materialien
3 and 4' (now in: H-G. Backhaus Dialektik der Wertform:
Untersuchungen zur Marxschen Ökonomiekritik ça ira, Freiburg
i. Br. 1997), and Backhaus 1981. Reichelt, whose name is associated
with Backhaus as founder of the Kapitallogik school (cf. P. Ruben
1977), cannot be regarded as having consistently followed a program of
logical reconstruction of Marx's theory. His critique of Flatow and
Huisken (H&P 1978 pp. 43-56) for instance, reveals that logical and
historical elements are for him still mixed together. Back

Hirsch substitutes the problem of a conceptual development
of the state form with an assertion:

"The fundamental form-determination of the bourgeois state, namely,
the doubling of bourgeois society into society and state and the formal
particularisation of the state as an administrative apparatus separated
from society, cannot be derived out of the abstraction of isolated structural
elements, but requires an analysis of the social reproduction process and
the laws determining it in its totality." (Hirsch 1974a p.CXL)
A conceptual problematic is passed over in favour of historico-empirical
research:
"The investigation of the capitalist process of accumulation
and crisis therefore forms the central foundation of a historically concretised
state-analysis." (ibid. p.CXLIII)
Down with philosophy! Long live sociology! Back

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